@effortlessmotion/pdf-to-md

Convert born-digital and scanned PDFs to Markdown. pdf-to-md reads each page's text layer and uses local OCR where needed. It returns a QA report; the OCR path marks text it cannot place reliably for review.

Use it when you need editable Markdown plus evidence about conversion quality. OCR runs locally and makes no cloud calls.

Requirements

• Node.js 22.13 or newer
• English text for the bundled OCR model. Text-layer extraction can preserve other languages.

Install

npm install @effortlessmotion/pdf-to-md

Convert a PDF

The package installs the pdf-to-md executable:

npx pdf-to-md book.pdf

This writes book.md. Pages with too little embedded text are assessed individually for OCR, so one document can use both extraction paths. The command reports those choices on stderr.

Specify an output path or force OCR when needed:

npx pdf-to-md scan.pdf notes.md --ocr

A conversion can produce ordinary Markdown plus visible review markers:

## DAILY TALLIES

Every skiff was counted at the north pier.

> [review: unstructured labels] 12 47 380 5 91

The excerpt is illustrative. Review markers preserve text whose structure could not be recovered reliably.

Library use

import { pdfToMarkdown } from '@effortlessmotion/pdf-to-md';

const { markdown, report, warnings } = await pdfToMarkdown('book.pdf');

console.log(markdown);
console.log(report.path); // "text", "ocr", or "mixed"
console.warn(warnings);

pdfToMarkdown() uses the same text-first, automatic-OCR behavior as the CLI. It returns data and does not write files or exit the process. Conversion failures use PdfToMdError where the library assigns a package error code; native filesystem errors can also surface when inputs cannot be read.

Use extractText() or extractOcr() when you need to choose the path yourself. The API documentation lists the public functions, options and return types.

Know which path ran

The QA report identifies the extraction path and highlights output that deserves review. Important cases:

• The bundled OCR model recognizes English. Use text-layer extraction for PDFs whose embedded text is in another language.
• A page can contain both embedded text and a large image with additional text. The text path warns about these hybrid pages so you can compare a targeted OCR pass.
• > [floats] and > [review: ...] blocks contain recognized text that the converter could not place confidently. They are intentionally visible.
• OCR quality depends on the scan. Check low-confidence words and rendered pages before relying on the result.

Use --json to print the report:

npx pdf-to-md book.pdf --json

See quality checks and tuning for the audit workflow, report fields and OCR controls.

Common CLI options

pdf-to-md <file.pdf> [out.md] [flags]
pdf-to-md render <file.pdf> <page>[-<page>]
pdf-to-md audit <words.jsonl> <file.md>

Common flags:

• --ocr forces OCR; --no-ocr disables automatic OCR fallback.
• --pages N[-M] converts a page range.
• --stdout writes the converted content to stdout.
• --json prints the QA report.
• --format md|txt|raw selects Markdown, plain text or analysis JSON.
• --debug-words=FILE writes source text items or recognized OCR words for pdf-to-md audit. Use --page-markers when producing Markdown for a page-by-page audit.
• --dpi=N changes OCR render resolution. The default is 288; higher values are not always more accurate.

Run npx pdf-to-md --help for the complete option list.

Agent skill

An optional skill teaches compatible coding agents how to inspect the report, render suspect pages and run targeted conversions:

npx skills add kmalakoff/pdf-to-md

Support and license

Report problems through the GitHub issue tracker. See CONTRIBUTING.md to work on the package. The package is licensed under the MIT License.