Document to Markdown for AI: PDF, OCR, Word, Excel, PowerPoint

Turn any business document into clean Markdown, JSON tables and RAG-ready chunks — one Actor for PDF, scanned PDF, images, DOCX/DOC, XLSX/XLS, PPTX/PPT, ODT/ODS/ODP, RTF and HTML.

• Every common format in one place. Modern and legacy Office files (DOC, XLS, PPT, RTF, OpenDocument) are converted too.
• OCR only where it is needed. Pages with a text layer are read directly. Scanned pages and images go through Tesseract OCR in 11 languages, including Ukrainian and Russian (Cyrillic) as well as English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch and Czech.
• Structure kept for LLMs. Headings (#, ##), lists and tables as Markdown, every table also as JSON rows, optional chunks with their nearest heading for vector databases.

Spreadsheet cells keep their values exactly: text stays text (96.50 is not turned into 96.5), numbers follow the cell's number format (1,234.50).

Why this Actor

	This Actor	Typical alternatives in the Apify Store (Oct 2026)
Price	$1 per 1,000 text pages, $4 per 1,000 OCR pages — you pay per page, OCR only for scanned pages	$3–5 per 1,000 PDFs plus $15–20 per 1,000 OCR pages
Formats	PDF, scans, images, DOCX/DOC, XLSX/XLS, PPTX/PPT, ODT/ODS/ODP, RTF, HTML — one Actor	Mostly PDF only; Office files need another tool
Structure	Headings, lists, tables as Markdown and JSON rows, RAG chunks with their heading	Often plain text, tables lost
Cyrillic	Ukrainian and Russian OCR built in	English-first OCR

Input

{
  "sources": [
    { "url": "https://example.com/report.pdf" },
    { "url": "https://example.com/contract.docx" }
  ],
  "ocrMode": "auto",
  "ocrLanguages": ["eng", "ukr"],
  "includeTables": true,
  "chunkSize": 1500
}

Field	Meaning
sources	Document URLs. Files in your own Apify key-value store work too: set the store's access to "Anyone with ID can read" and use https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/<store ID>/records/<key> (the Actor runs with limited permissions and does not use your token).
ocrMode	auto (scanned pages only), always, never
ocrLanguages	Languages expected in scans and images
includeTables	Return tables as JSON rows (header first)
chunkSize	Characters per RAG chunk, 0 = no chunks
maxPagesPerDocument	Pages beyond the limit are skipped and not charged

Output

One dataset item per document:

{
  "url": "https://example.com/report.pdf",
  "fileName": "report.pdf",
  "format": "pdf",
  "sourcePages": 3,
  "textPages": 2,
  "ocrPages": 1,
  "characters": 5120,
  "metadata": { "title": "Quarterly Supply Report", "author": "..." },
  "markdown": "# Quarterly Supply Report\n\nThe warehouse in Lviv received 1,240 pallets...\n\n| Item | Quantity | Price |\n| --- | --- | --- |\n| Cement | 420 | 96.50 |",
  "tables": [[["Item", "Quantity", "Price"], ["Cement", "420", "96.50"]]],
  "chunks": [{ "index": 0, "heading": "Quarterly Supply Report", "text": "..." }],
  "warnings": [],
  "seconds": 1.4
}

A document that cannot be downloaded or read gets an error field instead and is not charged. Markdown longer than 4 million characters is stored in full in the run's key-value store (markdownKey).

Pricing

Pay per event — you pay only for converted pages:

Event	Price	What counts
page	$1 per 1,000	a PDF page read from its text layer; for Office, HTML and text files — every 3,000 characters of output (at least 1 per document)
ocr-page	$4 per 1,000	a scanned PDF page or an image frame read with OCR

Plus Apify's standard start fee of $0.05 per 1,000 runs. Failed documents and skipped pages are not charged, and pages with a text layer or blank pages are never charged as OCR. The run stops before it would exceed your maximum charge per run.

Use with AI agents and code

• MCP (Claude, Cursor, VS Code, any MCP client): add https://mcp.apify.com?tools=ai_admin/document-to-markdown as an MCP server — the agent gets one tool with this Actor's input schema and pays per use through your Apify account.
• One HTTP call that returns the results:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/ai_admin~document-to-markdown/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"sources": [{"url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/FloomuI2DrQCJazY8/records/text-en.pdf"}, {"url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/FloomuI2DrQCJazY8/records/doc-uk.docx"}], "ocrMode": "auto", "ocrLanguages": ["eng", "ukr"], "includeTables": true}'

• Agentic payments: the Actor is enabled for Apify's agentic payments (x402), so autonomous agents can pay per run.

Open source: github.com/AndriyVK/-apify-document-tools

Limits

• Tables are detected in PDFs with a text layer and in Office/HTML files. Tables in scanned pages come out as OCR text.
• RTF files keep no heading styles, so their headings arrive as plain paragraphs.
• Password-protected files are not supported. Maximum download size is 200 MB.

Feedback

Found a document that converts badly? Open an issue with a link to a sample (or a similar public file) — fixes for real documents get priority.