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.

Will my code blocks be translated?

No. The preservation prompt explicitly forbids translating content inside fenced code blocks or inline code, and a post-translation validation pass flags any code-fence count mismatch as a visible warning.

How is quality compared to DeepL or Google Translate?

Comparable on prose. Superior on structured Markdown content because DeepL/Google operate on text without Markdown awareness — they routinely break link syntax, translate inside code fences, and lose backticks. We protect every Markdown construct explicitly and verify the output structurally.

No. Link targets are kept as-is — and we verify it: every URL in the source must also be present in the output, or a warning is raised.

How big a document can I translate?

It depends on your plan. Free: up to 10 000 characters per request. Starter: 25 000. Pro: 50 000. Business: 100 000. Larger documents are truncated with a visible warning telling you how many characters got dropped — chunking longer inputs into multiple requests is on the roadmap.

Which languages are supported?

25 major languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Arabic, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian, plus the Nordic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish).

1 credit per 10 000 characters of input, minimum 1 credit. A 5 000-char README costs 1 credit; a 35 000-char doc costs 4 credits. The same source text + same target language hits a content cache and is re-translated for FREE — useful when iterating on a doc you keep tweaking.

What if my document is longer than the plan cap?

Documents larger than the cap are truncated with a visible warning telling you how many characters were dropped. Within the cap, documents over ~8 000 characters are automatically chunked at safe boundaries (paragraph breaks, never inside a fenced code block or table) and translated piece-by-piece, then re-assembled — so a 50 000-character Pro request is handled as ~7 Gemini calls under the hood with no quality regression at the joins.

Is there a glossary or bilingual mode?

Not yet. Custom glossary support (forcing specific terms to stay verbatim) and bilingual side-by-side output are on the roadmap.

Translate Markdown — AI Translation

Markdown-aware translation

Most translators destroy Markdown: code blocks get “translated,” link syntax gets broken, headings lose their pound signs. Our pipeline sends the document to a Gemini model with a hardened 10-rule prompt that explicitly protects every Markdown construct — fenced code blocks, inline code, links, images, math, frontmatter, tables — and then runs a structural validation pass over the output to flag any divergence (lost URL, missing code fence, heading-count drift) as a visible warning.

It uses modern LLMs for the actual translation, which means context-aware results: idioms become idioms, technical terms stay technical, and the tone matches the original. Code, frontmatter values you didn't whitelist, URLs, and inline HTML pass through unchanged.

What we do

25 supported languages including French, Spanish, German, Mandarin, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Russian, Korean
Code blocks, math (`$...$`, `$$...$$`), URLs, and inline HTML preserved byte-for-byte
Frontmatter YAML keys preserved; only `title`, `description`, `summary`, `subtitle` values get translated
Structural validation: every output is checked for code-fence count, URL set, and heading count mismatches against the source
Target-language preference remembered between sessions

Use it to localize documentation, translate AI-generated content, ship multi-language READMEs, or prepare technical content for non-English audiences.

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

Translate Markdown — AI Translation That Keeps Formatting

Markdown-aware translation

What we do

How it works

Use cases

Frequently asked questions

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