Blog Post to Markdown — Save Articles as Clean Text
A modern blog post is 3KB of writing inside 800KB of page weight: ad slots, sticky share buttons, "you may also like" carousels, autoplaying videos, three newsletter popups. None of it is content. Our converter strips it all and gives you the post — title, byline, body, code blocks if any, images with alt text — as Markdown you can actually read or feed to an LLM.
What gets kept, what gets dropped
Kept: the post title (becomes # H1), the author name and publish date (kept as YAML front matter when requested), the article body in correct paragraph order, headings, blockquotes, lists, code blocks, images with their alt text. Dropped: every ad slot, share buttons, comment threads, related-post widgets, sidebar columns, modal popups (newsletter, GDPR, paywall teasers), and footer link soup. The before/after byte ratio is usually 50–100×.
How we identify the article body
Modern blogs follow Open Graph and JSON-LD Article conventions, which gives us a structured signal for title, author, and date. For the body, we run a Readability-style pass (the same algorithm Firefox Reader View uses, hardened for edge cases) that scores DOM nodes by content density and link-to-text ratio. The winning subtree is the article. Then we apply Markdown-specific cleanup: collapse trailing whitespace, normalise smart quotes, deduplicate consecutive blank lines.
Before / After
Before (PDF):
[Blog post HTML — 800KB page]
<aside class="sidebar"><h3>Trending</h3>… 12 links …</aside>
<div class="ad-slot">… Google Ads iframe …</div>
<article>
<h1>How We Scaled to 10M Users</h1>
<span class="byline">By Jane Doe · Mar 4, 2026</span>
<p>The first year was the hardest …</p>
</article>
<div class="newsletter-popup">Subscribe!</div>
After (Markdown):
---
title: "How We Scaled to 10M Users"
author: "Jane Doe"
date: "2026-03-04"
---
# How We Scaled to 10M Users
The first year was the hardest …
Frequently asked questions
Does this remove ads and tracking pixels from blog posts?
Completely — ad iframes, tracking scripts, share buttons, and related-content widgets are all dropped before extraction. The output is text and (optionally) inline images; nothing executable, nothing that phones home.
Can I save Substack and Medium posts?
Yes for both — they're among the most-converted sources. Substack's clean article structure converts with very high fidelity. Medium adds some boilerplate (author bio cards, "claps" prompts, reading-time badges) that we strip. Member-only Medium posts behind the paywall obviously can't be converted; only the public preview is accessible to any scraper.
Are author and publish date kept in the output?
Yes — when present in the page's metadata (Open Graph, JSON-LD Article, or schema.org microdata), they're emitted as YAML front matter at the top of the Markdown. If the page lacks structured metadata, we fall back to visible byline detection.
Can I batch-convert an entire blog archive?
Not via MDisBetter directly — the web tool is one URL at a time. For batch archives, Trafilatura's built-in CLI is the easiest OSS path: trafilatura --sitemap https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml --output-dir ./posts --output-format markdown handles most blog platforms, since they publish a sitemap at /sitemap.xml or /post-sitemap.xml. For paginated archives without a sitemap, a 20-line Python crawler walking "Older posts" links covers the gap.
Do images in blog posts get downloaded?
The MDisBetter web tool keeps the original image URLs in the Markdown so the file stays small — fine if the source site stays up. For fully-offline archives, post-process the Markdown with a small script: regex-extract every , fetch each image with requests, save to ./images/, rewrite the Markdown links to relative paths. Twenty lines of Python.
Your AI doesn't read PDFs directly. It first has to extract the text, decode the layout, ignore the metadata — before it can even start answering. A Markdown file removes all of those steps. Your AI reads it instantly. So you get faster responses, more accurate results, and zero information lost along the way.
Size-wise, it's 100 to 500 times lighter for the same content. A 15 MB PDF becomes a 30 KB .md file. So your AI knowledge base can hold hundreds of documents instead of a handful.
MDisBetter brings 19 free tools together for that — documents, videos, audio, web pages and prompts.
How does it work?
Drop a PDF, a video, an audio file or a URL. MDisBetter extracts the content and gives you a clean Markdown file. So you can send it to your AI, add it to your project files, or store it in your knowledge base — without losing anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I convert a PDF to Markdown for free?
Upload your PDF to MDisBetter, click Convert, and get structured Markdown in seconds. No signup, no installation — it works directly in your browser. The free plan includes 50 credits per month.
Why is Markdown better than PDF for AI?
Markdown reduces token usage by up to 95% compared to PDF. AI models like ChatGPT and Claude process Markdown far more efficiently because it contains only content structure — no fonts, no layout data, no binary overhead.
What file types can MDisBetter convert?
MDisBetter converts PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, YouTube videos (transcript), audio files (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, WEBM), and any web page URL to clean Markdown.
Is MDisBetter free?
Yes, free to start. The free plan includes 50 credits per month. All processing happens securely — your files are never stored.
Can I extract a YouTube transcript as Markdown?
Yes. Paste the YouTube video URL, click Convert, and get the full transcript structured as Markdown with headings and timestamps. Perfect for feeding video content to AI tools.
PDF → Markdown
Faithful and structured conversion of your documents
Text to MD, EPUB to MD, MD to PDF, MD Cleaner, Merger, Chunker, Token Counter, Context Builder
Free
—
Word to MD
0.5 credit
per page
Excel to MD
0.5 credit
per conversion
Single URL Scrape
0.5 credit
per call
Site Crawl
1 credit
per page
Translate
1 credit
per 10 000 chars (min 1, free re-translation on cache hit)
Prompt Optimizer
1 credit
per call
System Prompt Generator
1 credit
per call
Audio to MD
2 credits
per minute
Video to MD
2 credits
per minute
YouTube to MD
2 credits
per minute
Image OCR
4 credits
per image (0 on cache hit)
PDF to MD
4 credits
per page
PPTX to MD
4 credits
per slide
Questions
Yes! You get 50 credits every month to use any tool. Basic tools like MD Cleaner or Token Counter cost just 0.5 credit per use. When you run out, credits reset the next month or you can upgrade for more.
Wait for your monthly reset or upgrade to a higher plan. Credits renew on your billing date each month.
Yes, cancel anytime with one click. No questions asked. You keep access until the end of your billing period.
Pro gives you 30,000 credits for $29 — that's 30x more credits than Starter for just 3x the price. Every credit costs less, so you get far more value per dollar.