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.

Why would I have RTF files in 2026?

Legal practice management software (some firms' billing systems output RTF), US federal court filings (PACER produces RTF in some workflows), state government document repositories, old TextEdit documents on Mac, exports from legacy Windows apps. The format outlives its makers.

Is RTF conversion better than DOCX conversion?

Often cleaner, actually — RTF is more constrained than .docx, so there's less hidden formatting noise to clean up. The output tends to be tidier on the first pass.

Are embedded images in RTF extracted?

Yes — embedded images (uncommon in RTF but they exist) are extracted to a separate folder and referenced via Markdown image syntax, same flow as word-with-images-to-markdown .

Does this work on RTF from old Mac TextEdit?

Yes — TextEdit's RTF dialect is well-supported. The output reflects the styling you applied (headings, bold, lists). Custom Mac-specific font references are dropped (no Markdown equivalent) but content is preserved.

What about RTF with track changes?

RTF supports revision marks (less commonly used than in .docx). The default behaviour is the same as word-with-track-changes-to-markdown : accept all changes, strip comments, emit clean final Markdown.

RTF to Markdown — Convert .rtf Files

Why RTF is still around

RTF was Microsoft's pre-XML interchange format, dating to 1987. It survives because it's the lowest-common-denominator format that preserves basic styling: bold, italic, headings, lists, simple tables. US federal court filings, some state government workflows, legal billing software, and old WordPerfect ecosystems still produce RTF. The Mac's built-in TextEdit defaults to RTF.

What converts well

Headings, bold/italic/underline, ordered and unordered lists, simple tables, hyperlinks, embedded images (when present): all preserved cleanly. RTF is more constrained than .docx so there's less to lose. The conversion typically produces cleaner Markdown than .docx because RTF doesn't have the run-fragmentation problem that Word documents suffer from.

What's simplified

Custom font specifications, exotic colour markup, embedded OLE objects (rare in RTF anyway), revision marks, and form fields are simplified or dropped. None of that is content. If you also have PDFs of these documents, see PDF to Markdown for them.

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

RTF to Markdown — Convert Rich Text Format Files

Why RTF is still around

What converts well

What's simplified

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