Turn a PDF into clean text or Markdown
Pull the words out of a PDF with the structure intact — headings stay headings, paragraphs rejoin instead of breaking mid-sentence, and running headers and page numbers are left out.
or tap to browse
Keeps headings, lists and paragraphs. Works on PDFs with a text layer.
Built for one job
Each tool does a single thing properly, with the settings that job actually needs.
Finishes in seconds
No queue and no waiting around — most jobs are done before you look away.
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How to turn a pdf into clean text or markdown
- 1
Add your PDF
Drop in the document. Reports, papers, contracts and ebooks all work — anything with real text rather than scanned images.
- 2
Pick Markdown or plain text
Markdown keeps the headings, lists and paragraph breaks. Plain text gives you just the words.
- 3
Copy or download
Take the result as .md or .txt, or copy it straight into your editor or a chat with an AI model.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between this and a normal PDF to text converter?
Most of them print the text runs in the order the PDF stores them, which is why the output breaks mid-sentence at every line, repeats the running header on every page and turns headings into ordinary lines. This one reads the position and size of the text to work out the structure first: larger text becomes a heading, a line that reaches the right margin is joined to the one below it, and lines that repeat in the same spot on most pages are left out.
Why would I want Markdown rather than plain text?
Because the structure survives. Headings stay headings, lists stay lists, and paragraphs stay whole. That matters if you are pasting into a notes app, a wiki, a static site, or into a chat with an AI model — a model given Markdown can see the shape of the document, whereas a wall of broken lines loses it.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
No, and it will tell you so rather than returning an empty file. A scanned PDF has no text in it — each page is a photograph of a page. Our Image and PDF to Text tool recognises those with OCR. If you can select and copy the text when you open the PDF in a reader, this tool will read it.
What happens to tables?
Table cells come through as text in reading order, row by row. Rebuilding a table reliably from coordinates is genuinely hard and getting it wrong silently is worse than not trying, so the text is kept and the grid is not invented.
Why did a heading come out as ordinary text?
Headings are identified by being set larger than the body text. A document that marks its headings only with bold at the same size has nothing to measure, so those lines read as paragraphs. It is the same reason a heading in a screenshot cannot be detected.
Something is missing from the output.
Turn off "Skip headers and page numbers" in the settings and try again. That option drops lines that repeat in the top or bottom margin across most pages, which is right for a long report and occasionally wrong for a short document where a genuine line repeats.
Common tasks
These open the same tool, already set up for a specific job.