Convert PDF to Markdown on your Mac

Drag a PDF into Milldown and get clean Markdown out — headings, paragraphs, and tables preserved, page furniture stripped. Nothing is uploaded: conversion runs entirely on your Mac.

How to convert a PDF to Markdown

Open Milldown and drop your PDF anywhere in the window.Or right-click the file in Finder → Services → Convert to Markdown.
The conversion runs locally — a 200-page PDF takes seconds.The token badge shows exactly how much smaller the Markdown is.
Copy the result to your clipboard, save it as a .md file, or clean it up first.The built-in Clean Up pass strips repeated page headers, footers, and page numbers.

What the conversion preserves

Structure — headings, paragraphs, and reading order from the PDF's text layer.
Tables — converted to Markdown pipe tables you can actually edit.
Multi-page documents — handled as one continuous document, with the option to strip per-page boilerplate.

Embedded images aren't carried into the Markdown (it's a text format) — for image-heavy PDFs, keep the original alongside the converted text.

Why Markdown instead of uploading the PDF to an AI? Uploading a PDF natively bills every page as text plus an image — Anthropic documents roughly 1,500–3,000 tokens per page. That per-page image cost is pure overhead once the text has been extracted, and it is re-billed on every conversation turn.

Across our test documents Markdown cuts PDF token usage by 60–75%, depending on how text-dense the pages are: sparse pages save more, because the fixed per-page image cost dominates. This is the one format where the saving is large, well-documented and unambiguous — which is why the PDF figure is the one we lead with.

Scanned PDF? Covered.

If your PDF has no embedded text (a scan or a photographed document), Milldown detects it automatically and runs on-device OCR using Apple's Vision framework. See the dedicated guide: scanned PDF to Markdown.

From the command line

milldown report.pdf -o report.md

Milldown installs an optional CLI (app menu → Install Command-Line Tool) with full option parity — handy for scripts and CI.

Try it on your own files

Milldown converts PDFs, Office documents, web pages, and scans into clean Markdown — entirely on your Mac. Free for 14 days.

Get Milldown for macOS

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · $39 one-time after trial (excl. VAT) · no subscription