Files never leave your device.How it works
How to convert PDF to Markdown
- 1Drop your PDF above (or click to select).
- 2Click Convert to Markdown.
- 3Download the .md file.
Frequently asked questions
- How are headings and lists detected?
- There's no structure stored in a PDF, so HivePDF infers it from the layout: text noticeably larger than the body becomes a heading, and lines that start with a bullet or a number become list items. The rest is grouped into paragraphs.
- Does it work on scanned PDFs?
- No — a scan is just images with no text layer to read. Run OCR first to add a text layer, then convert to Markdown.
- Does my file get uploaded?
- No. The text is extracted and converted entirely in your browser — your document never leaves your device.
PDF into clean Markdown
Markdown is the lingua franca for feeding documents to large language models, static-site generators, and note apps — but PDFs don't carry structure you can export. PDF to Markdown reads the text layer and rebuilds a sensible document: it detects headings, bullet and numbered lists, and paragraphs from the page layout and writes them as Markdown.
Built for LLM and docs workflows
If you're building a RAG pipeline, drafting docs, or pasting content into a chat model, Markdown is far easier to work with than raw PDF text. The output keeps heading levels and lists so the structure survives, which helps models chunk and understand the content.
Notes and limits
The structure is inferred heuristically, so complex multi-column layouts or tables may not map perfectly — review the result for anything critical. Scanned PDFs need OCR first. Everything runs locally, so nothing is uploaded.
How the layout gets read as structure
Under the hood, HivePDF walks the PDF's text runs and records each one's font size, weight, and position on the page. A run that's meaningfully larger than the surrounding body text, or set in bold on its own line, is treated as a heading; its size relative to the rest of the document decides whether it becomes an H1, H2, or H3 in the output. Lines beginning with a dash, bullet glyph, or a number followed by a period become list items, and consecutive lines at the same indent are grouped into one list rather than split apart.
Where the conversion struggles
Tables are the biggest limitation: a PDF stores a table as positioned text, not as rows and columns, so cells often collapse into a single line or paragraph rather than a Markdown table. Multi-column academic papers and brochures can interleave text from both columns if the reading order in the PDF is unusual. Footnotes and page headers or footers sometimes get pulled into the body text. Treat the output as a strong first draft and fix trouble spots by hand rather than expecting a perfect round-trip.
A common next step
Many people run this after OCR on a scanned document, or alongside Extract Images when the source PDF mixes diagrams with text they want kept separate.