Turn lecture notes into Markdown

Notes that live in a PDF cannot be searched, edited or pasted into anything. This turns them into Markdown with the structure intact, ready for whatever you take notes in.

• The document heading becomes the title, not the file name.
• Lists stay lists and tables come out as pipe tables.
• Runs in this tab, so a set of notes stays yours.

The title comes from the document, not the file name

Where page one opens on the largest text in the document, that line is the title. Using the file name unconditionally 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.

A document that opens on body text has no such line, and only then does the file name stand in. That is the fallback rather than the rule, which is the opposite of what most converters do.

Lists and tables, which is where converters give up

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 nothing becomes a list. Which font a one-character word was set in is the whole of the evidence, and it is read before the heading rule, because a bullet is usually a couple of points larger than the prose it marks and would otherwise be promoted to a heading.

A hanging indent puts the number in a box of its own, so the page reports 1 and the sentence as two separate lines. A marker alone on a line is joined to the line below when that line starts further right and follows closely.

Tables are recovered as pipe tables, from the same geometry the spreadsheet writer uses, rather than being flattened into a row of words. A grid with no heading row gets an empty header rather than losing its first row of data to one.

Will it work with my note-taking app?

It is ordinary Markdown, so Obsidian, Notion, Bear and anything else that reads it will open the file.

What about diagrams?

Diagrams are pictures on the page and are not reproduced in the Markdown. The text around them is.

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

Loading the editor…