Drop in a PDF, DOCX, or TXT file and get clean Markdown back in seconds. No uploads, no signup, no server — everything runs client-side in your browser tab. Built for devs, technical writers, and Obsidian/Notion/Logseq users who live in plain text.
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Maker
📌
Hey everyone 👋
I built Flashdown because I kept converting docs to Markdown for my Obsidian vault and every existing tool wanted me to upload my file to some server first. That felt unnecessary for something as simple as text extraction.
Flashdown does the whole conversion in your browser — no backend, no file ever leaves your machine. Drop a PDF, DOCX, or TXT file in, get clean Markdown out. Works offline once the page loads.
Right now it handles:
PDF (extracts real text layers — not OCR yet, that's next)
DOCX (headings, bold/italic, links, lists, tables)
TXT (cleans up spacing/line breaks into proper Markdown)
Would love feedback on:
What other formats you'd want (HTML? RTF? Google Docs export?)
Edge cases where the Markdown output looks wrong
Whether OCR for scanned PDFs is worth building next
Try it here: https://flashdown.co.in — no signup needed, just drop a file.
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Dragged a 40-page PDF in and the headings and code blocks came out clean, no server hop needed. Love that I can close the tab and keep my docs private.
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Maker
@elelcizehr93509 That's exactly it — 40 pages parsed locally, no intermediary server seeing your document. One thing that surprised early users: it handles scanned PDFs with text layers too (just not pure image scans yet). Did you have any sections that lost formatting, or did it hold up all the way?
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The client-side approach is genuinely useful since nothing leaves your machine, and the Markdown output was surprisingly clean on a messy PDF I threw at it. Will be keeping this bookmarked.
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Maker
@etinkocako7yqn great to see that you found my tool useful more updates are on the roadmap, open to suggestions.
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runs locally in the browser and still gives me clean markdown from a messy pdf, exactly the kind of tool i wish existed an hour ago.
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Maker
@c_kurtar55949 That's the exact use case I built this for — the moment you realize you need plain text but your doc is locked in Word/PDF hell. Since you just used it, curious: what would make you use this next time instead of manually copying? Speed, or something else?
Dragged a 40-page PDF in and the headings and code blocks came out clean, no server hop needed. Love that I can close the tab and keep my docs private.
@elelcizehr93509 That's exactly it — 40 pages parsed locally, no intermediary server seeing your document. One thing that surprised early users: it handles scanned PDFs with text layers too (just not pure image scans yet). Did you have any sections that lost formatting, or did it hold up all the way?
The client-side approach is genuinely useful since nothing leaves your machine, and the Markdown output was surprisingly clean on a messy PDF I threw at it. Will be keeping this bookmarked.
@etinkocako7yqn great to see that you found my tool useful more updates are on the roadmap, open to suggestions.
runs locally in the browser and still gives me clean markdown from a messy pdf, exactly the kind of tool i wish existed an hour ago.
@c_kurtar55949 That's the exact use case I built this for — the moment you realize you need plain text but your doc is locked in Word/PDF hell. Since you just used it, curious: what would make you use this next time instead of manually copying? Speed, or something else?