PDF to Markdown Extraction

Extract text content from PDF documents and save as clean markdown.

How It Works

Claude is multimodal. Use the Read tool to visually read PDF pages and transcribe the text directly.

Workflow

1. Check PDF size - Count pages using pdfinfo <file>.pdf | grep Pages
2. Split if large (10+ pages) - Use qpdf to split into 4-page chunks
3. Extract text - For small PDFs: read directly. For large PDFs: process chunks in parallel using Task agents
4. Merge results - Combine extracted text in page order
5. Format as markdown - Apply appropriate heading levels, lists, and formatting
6. Review for errors - Check grammar/spelling, fix obvious OCR-style typos
7. Save output - Write markdown file next to original PDF with same base name
8. Cleanup - Remove temporary chunk files