PDF to Markdown Converter

Convert PDFs to clean Markdown with optional OCR for scanned documents. Lightweight alternative to heavy document processing tools.

Features

• Fast Text Extraction: Uses PDF.js for native text PDFs
• OCR Support: Tesseract.js for scanned/image documents
• Smart Mode: Auto-detects best extraction method per page
• Layout Preservation: Maintains document structure
• Multi-language OCR: 14+ languages supported
• Batch Processing: Convert multiple PDFs at once

Input

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
file	string	-	Upload a PDF file
pdfUrls	array	-	URLs of PDFs to convert
mode	string	"quick"	Extraction mode
language	string	"eng"	OCR language
preserveLayout	boolean	true	Preserve document structure

Extraction Modes

• quick: Fast extraction using PDF.js - best for native text PDFs
• ocr: Tesseract OCR - use for scanned documents or images
• combined: Auto-detects per page - uses OCR when text extraction fails

Output

Results are saved to the dataset:

{
    "status": "success",
    "fileName": "document.pdf",
    "pdfUrl": "https://...",
    "markdown": "# Document Title\n\nContent here...",
    "pageCount": 5,
    "extractionMethod": "pdf.js",
    "characterCount": 12345
}

Use Cases

1. LLM Preprocessing: Convert PDFs for AI/RAG pipelines
2. Documentation Migration: Convert PDF docs to Markdown
3. Content Extraction: Pull text from reports and papers
4. Accessibility: Make PDF content more accessible
5. Archive Conversion: Convert legacy PDFs to modern format

Supported Languages (OCR)

• English, French, German, Spanish, Italian
• Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian
• Chinese (Simplified/Traditional)
• Japanese, Korean, Arabic

Example

# Using Apify CLI
apify run -i '{
    "pdfUrls": ["https://example.com/document.pdf"],
    "mode": "combined",
    "language": "eng"
}'

Technical Notes

• Quick mode is 10-50x faster than OCR
• OCR quality depends on scan quality and resolution
• Combined mode adds overhead for analysis
• Large PDFs may require more memory
• Some complex layouts may not convert perfectly