Convert PDFs into structured, semantic Markdown that preserves the document's logical structure — headings, tables, lists, and reading order — rather than producing flat text. This is significantly higher quality than reading a PDF directly with the tool, which only extracts raw text without structure.

Before running any commands, set to the absolute path of the directory containing this SKILL.md file. Use in all commands below.

The wrapper automatically installs the platform-specific binary into from the CDN. It caches the binary and only checks for updates every 6 hours, so subsequent runs are fast.

$SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-markdown INPUT.pdf OUTPUT.md

If is omitted, the converter writes the Markdown to stdout instead.

For multiple files, pass directories instead of individual files. The converter processes all PDFs in the input directory in parallel, which is much faster than converting one at a time.

$SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-markdown INPUT_DIR/ OUTPUT_DIR/

To extract images from the PDF and reference them in the output Markdown, add the flag:

$SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-markdown --enable-image-export INPUT.pdf OUTPUT.md

Images are saved to alongside the output file and referenced as standard Markdown image links. This is useful when feeding output to LLMs that support vision, or when image context improves downstream accuracy. Off by default because it increases processing time for image-heavy documents.

Free for processing up to 1,000 documents per calendar month.

Commercial license required for:

Contact for commercial licensing.