Hey Product Hunt! 👋 I built pdftomd.app because I got tired of fighting with PDF formatting, and I felt there had to be a more private way to solve it. Every time I tried importing research papers or manuals into my Obsidian vault, or prepping clean semantic chunks for an AI RAG pipeline, copying and pasting from a PDF viewer would completely break the formatting. Paragraphs became fragmented, list indentations were stripped, and heading hierarchies disappeared. Worse, almost every free online converter required me to upload sensitive drafts, private contracts, or personal notes to their remote servers. How our approach evolved: Originally, we planned to run a heavy parsing model on a remote cloud backend. But we quickly realized two things: Running server-side APIs would force us to introduce paywalls, file-size limits, or annoying sign-up walls to cover server costs. It fundamentally compromised user privacy. No matter how many privacy policies we wrote, sending a PDF to a server always leaves a paper trail. So we pivoted to a local-first architecture. We utilized WebAssembly (WASM) to run the entire extraction and layout reconstruction locally inside your browser's sandbox. By running everything on your local CPU: Absolute Privacy: Your documents never leave your device. Feel free to open your browser’s F12 Network tab and inspect it. $0 Infrastructure: No server costs mean we can keep this tool 100% free, ad-free, with no usage caps. Offline Capable: Once cached, you can literally turn off your Wi-Fi and it keeps parsing. An Honest Caveat: This tool is designed strictly for text-based, born-digital PDFs (the ones where you can highlight text with your cursor). It does not support scanned PDFs because running local OCR in a browser is too resource-heavy and slow. Also, highly complex multi-column academic papers or dense tables might still require some manual formatting cleanup after conversion. I would love to get your feedback—especially on the layout mapping quality, edge-case PDFs that confuse our heuristic parser, or features you’d like to see next. What note-taking app or AI pipeline are you currently converting PDFs for? Let me know in the comments below! Cheers, Max Lin

PDFtoMD

Convert PDFs to Markdown locally in your browser

Convert PDFs to Markdown locally in your browser