PDF เป็น Markdown

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This reads a PDF's text and writes it out as Markdown, working out which lines are headings, where paragraphs begin and end, and which blocks are lists or tables. A PDF stores none of that - only characters at coordinates - so the structure is inferred from geometry, except where the document has a bookmark outline, which is used instead because it is the author's own account of the structure. The result is one .md file that re-flows; it does not reproduce the original pagination or layout.

Reach for it when a document has to become editable text again: a report going into a wiki, documentation that arrived as a PDF and now needs to live in a repository beside the code, or notes you would rather search and rewrite than scroll through.

วิธีทำงาน

1. Drop the PDF onto this page. The first five pages are checked for a text layer, so a scan is caught before you download an empty file.
2. Leave Use the bookmark outline on when the document has one. A real outline is more reliable than any guess made from type size.
3. Choose what else to detect: headings where no bookmark covers them, lists, and tables written as Markdown pipe tables.
4. Under advanced options, add a front matter block if the file is headed for a static site, and set a page range if you only want part of the document.
5. Press Convert to Markdown. The .md file downloads on its own.

A line becomes a heading when it is set larger than the body text around it, is short, and is followed by prose - three conditions rather than one, because any of them alone promotes running heads and figure captions by mistake. Bookmarks override the lot, which is why a document with a proper outline converts noticeably better than one without.

Paragraphs are rebuilt by asking why each line ended. A line that runs to the right edge of its column was broken by the typesetter, so the next line is joined onto it; a line that stops short ended on purpose, so a new paragraph starts. Hyphens at a line end are rejoined only when the continuation begins with a lowercase letter, which is what stops Coca- and Cola being welded into a word that was never in the document.

Tables are the least certain part of the conversion. Column boundaries are found by clustering the horizontal positions of text runs, so a real table converts cleanly while a two-column page layout can occasionally be read as one.

Extraction runs through PDF.js in a Web Worker inside your browser. What would be uploaded here is the document's text, which is usually the confidential part. Nothing about the text is sent, and the one request a run makes asks whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash of the bytes.