Turn a brochure or PDF into Markdown

Content stuck in a PDF cannot be edited, searched or pasted anywhere. This reads it, including a scanned page, and writes Markdown that keeps the structure.

The title is the document's own

Where page one opens on the largest text in the document, that line is the title. Taking the file name instead costs twice: a heading nobody wrote appears at the top, and every real heading is pushed down a level, so three levels of structure arrive as four and the outline is wrong all the way down.

The file name is the fallback, used only for a document that opens on body text and so has no title line to take.

Lists and tables, which is where this usually fails

A round bullet is set by most producers as the letter l in a symbol font, so every item arrives as a stray letter on a line of its own and no list is ever recognised. Which font a one-character word was set in is the whole of the evidence. It is read before the heading rule, because a bullet is typically set a couple of points larger than the prose it marks and would otherwise be promoted to a heading of its own.

A hanging indent puts the number in its own box, so the page reports the number and the sentence as two separate lines and no pattern over the text can join them. A marker alone on a line is joined to the line below when that line starts further right and follows closely, which is the shape of a hanging indent rather than of a page number above a heading.

Tables are recovered as pipe tables from the same geometry the spreadsheet writer uses, rather than being flattened into a row of words separated by spaces.

What happens to the images?

Pictures on the page are not reproduced in the Markdown. The text around them is.

Will it work on a scanned brochure?

Yes. Recognition runs first, which is what the first step of the plan is for.

Support and billing: support@gosmartpdf.com. Operated by Mrityunjay Kumar, India. Payments by Dodo Payments, our merchant of record.

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