How do I convert a PDF to Markdown for free?

Upload your PDF to mdisbetter.com, click Convert, and get clean structured Markdown in seconds. No signup, no installation — it works directly in your browser.

Why is Markdown better than PDF for AI?

Markdown reduces token usage by up to 95% compared to PDF when feeding documents to AI models like ChatGPT or Claude. PDF contains layout metadata, fonts, and binary data that waste tokens. Markdown preserves only the content structure that AI actually needs.

What file types can MDisBetter convert to Markdown?

MDisBetter converts PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, YouTube videos (transcript extraction), audio files (MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC, WEBM), and any web page URL to clean Markdown.

Is MDisBetter free to use?

Yes, MDisBetter is completely free. You get 10 conversions per day with no signup required. All tools work directly in your browser.

How do I extract a YouTube transcript as Markdown?

Paste the YouTube video URL into the YouTube to Markdown tool on mdisbetter.com and click Convert. The tool extracts the transcript and structures it as clean, formatted Markdown with headings and timestamps.

Does this work on ReadTheDocs and Sphinx-built sites?

Yes — Sphinx/RTD is one of the most common targets. The default Sphinx theme and the RTD theme both expose a clear div.document / main region that the converter extracts. Furo, Alabaster, and most community themes follow the same convention. For exotic themes that bury content in deeply-nested divs, a self-hosted script using BeautifulSoup with a custom CSS selector (e.g. soup.select_one("div.documentwrapper") ) plus html2text gives you full control.

How do code blocks survive the conversion?

Code blocks keep their language hint via the class="language-python" or data-language attribute that every modern docs theme adds. The result is a fenced Markdown block ( ```python ) that renders with syntax highlighting in any viewer. Inline <code> stays as backticks.

Can I crawl an entire documentation site, not just one page?

MDisBetter's web tool converts one URL at a time. For full-site crawls, the OSS path is short: pip-install Trafilatura, run trafilatura --sitemap https://docs.example.com/sitemap.xml --output-dir ./docs --output-format markdown , and you get one .md per page mirroring the URL structure. JS-rendered docs sites that defeat Trafilatura can be paged through the MDisBetter web tool one URL at a time, or rolled into a Playwright-based crawler.

Are admonitions (Note, Warning, Tip) preserved?

Yes — Sphinx .. note:: blocks, Docusaurus :::note blocks, and Material for MkDocs admonitions all become Markdown blockquotes with the label kept as bold prefix ( > **Note:** … ). Renders correctly in every Markdown viewer; round-trips back to the original syntax with a small post-processor if you need it.

What about versioned docs (v1, v2, latest)?

Each version lives at its own URL — we convert whichever URL you submit. For multi-version archives, fetch each version's sitemap separately and store under a version-prefixed folder. The converter doesn't silently merge versions.

Documentation to Markdown — ReadTheDocs, GitBook

Why docs sites don't convert cleanly with generic scrapers

A naïve HTML-to-Markdown pass on a ReadTheDocs page produces a 4,000-line file: half of it is the navigation tree expanded inline, a quarter is footer links, and somewhere in there is the actual content. Worse, the same nav tree gets duplicated on every page you scrape, so an archive of 200 pages is mostly identical chrome. Our converter detects the main content region using semantic markers (<main>, <article>, role="main") and template-aware heuristics for the major frameworks, then emits the article body only.

Framework-aware extraction

We recognise the common docs frameworks — Sphinx/ReadTheDocs, Docusaurus, MkDocs (Material), GitBook, Mintlify, Nextra, VitePress, Bookdown — and apply per-framework selectors so extraction is reliable. Code blocks keep their language hint (```python), admonitions ("Note", "Warning") become Markdown blockquotes with the label preserved, and internal cross-links are rewritten to relative .md paths so the archive is browsable offline.

Tool	Cost	Unit
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

Documentation to Markdown — Convert Any Docs Site

Why docs sites don't convert cleanly with generic scrapers

Framework-aware extraction

Before / After

Frequently asked questions

Stop feeding garbage
to your AI

Tools

Stop sending PDFs to your AI.

How does it work?

Frequently Asked Questions

Master any tool without watching a single YouTube video

Choose your plan

How credits work

Questions

Stop feeding garbageto your AI