EN

PDF to Markdown

Turn a PDF into a Markdown note, with its headings, lists, tables and images, ready for Obsidian or any editor. Scanned pages are read with OCR. Everything happens in your browser.

Beta Just released: if something does not come out as you expected, tell us.

How to convert a PDF to Markdown

  1. Choose the PDF.
  2. Press "Convert to Markdown".
  3. Open the .md file in Obsidian or any editor. If the PDF had images, a ZIP comes down with the note and its images side by side: unzip it into your vault.

What the note keeps

Headings, from the size of the type; paragraphs, joined again where the PDF cut them at the end of a line or a page; bulleted and numbered lists; tables with drawn borders, as Markdown tables; and the pictures, as files the note links to. Headers and page numbers repeated on every page are left out.

Scanned PDFs

A page that is only a picture of text is read with text recognition (OCR), in your browser too. It takes longer, and the text is as good as the scan: check names and figures.

Is it private?

Yes. Everything runs inside your web browser, using your own device. Nothing is uploaded to any server, so your documents stay completely private. On top of that, the tool runs in a private frame, served from a separate address (app.robinpdf.com) and kept apart from the ads: your browser does not let the page around it see the file you open there. How does this work without uploading?

Frequently asked questions

Is my PDF uploaded?

No. It is read in your browser and the note is written there. You can disconnect from the internet after this page loads and it still works (a scanned PDF needs the text-recognition engine, which downloads once).

Why a ZIP?

Markdown links to images instead of holding them, so a note with pictures travels with them in a folder. Unzip it in your Obsidian vault and the note shows them.

A table came out as text.

Only tables whose cells are drawn with lines are recognised as tables. Merged cells are written once, with the cells they cover left empty, because Markdown tables cannot merge cells.