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.

Can I just hit the "Raw" button to get the README as Markdown?

For the repo root README, yes — but Raw shows the source before GitHub's renderer resolves relative image paths, emoji shortcodes, and expanded references. The conversion gives you the rendered output normalised back to clean GFM, which is closer to what readers actually saw. Raw is also useless for wikis, issues, and discussions — none of which expose a Raw view.

Does this work on private repos?

The MDisBetter web tool fetches anonymously, so private repos return 404. For private content the right path is a self-hosted script: a requests session with your GitHub PAT in the header ( Authorization: token <pat> ), pull the rendered HTML from api.github.com/repos/.../readme (returns Markdown directly) or /wiki/... for wiki pages, then post-process. The GitHub REST API gives you the README as Markdown without any HTML conversion step needed.

How are issue comments and reactions preserved?

Each comment becomes a sub-section with author and timestamp as a small header line, then the comment body. Reactions are summarised compactly when present (e.g. 👍 12 · 🎉 3 ) under the comment, useful for grasping community sentiment without bloating the output.

Are GitHub-flavoured task lists and tables preserved?

Yes — task lists ( - [x] done , - [ ] todo ) round-trip to standard GFM checkbox syntax. Tables come through as pipe tables. Code blocks keep their language hint. Anything specific to GitHub's renderer (e.g. ::: warning admonitions) is normalised to the closest plain GFM equivalent (blockquotes with bold prefix).

Can I convert an entire repo's wiki at once?

The MDisBetter web tool is one URL at a time, but a wiki is just a Git repo of its own — clone it directly via git clone https://github.com/owner/repo.wiki.git and you have every page as raw Markdown without conversion. Use the web tool for individual wiki pages when you don't want the whole archive, or for issue/discussion pages where the cloning trick doesn't apply.

GitHub Repo to Markdown — Clean READMEs & Wikis

What gets extracted from each GitHub surface

Repo home (github.com/owner/repo): the rendered README only — no file tree, no language bar, no contributor row. The output is what you'd get if the maintainer had emailed you their README.md. Wiki pages (/wiki/PageName): the page body with its headings and links rewritten to relative paths so the wiki archive browses offline. Issues and pull requests: the title becomes # H1, the body of the OP becomes the content, comments become sub-sections with author and timestamp attribution. Discussions: same shape as issues, with the accepted answer marked when present.

Why convert what's "already Markdown"

READMEs are Markdown in the source repo, but the page you visit at github.com/owner/repo is HTML rendered by GitHub's own renderer. Copy-pasting that rendered HTML brings emoji shortcuts as Unicode glyphs, task-list checkboxes as <input> elements, and admonition syntax as styled divs — none of which round-trip to plain Markdown cleanly. Hitting "Raw" gives you the source but loses GitHub's rendered improvements (resolved relative links, embedded images, expanded shortcodes). The converter splits the difference: the rendered output, normalised back to clean GFM. If the repo's real docs are stored as PDFs in the repo, also try PDF to Markdown.

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

GitHub Repo to Markdown — Extract README and Docs

What gets extracted from each GitHub surface

Why convert what's "already Markdown"

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