Why not paste PDF text into README?

Paste loses heading hierarchy and code fences. Markdown from conversion preserves structure for GitHub’s renderer.

Relative links broken?

Vendors flatten hyperlinks. Recreate repo-relative paths manually after conversion — still faster than retyping sections.

Do the conversion on laptops joined to VPN; no SaaS upload reduces accidental exfiltration of chip roadmaps.

After cleanup, same Markdown can feed Hugo/Eleventy — see [PDF to Markdown for static sites](/blog/pdf-to-md-static-site-hugo-eleventy).

PDF to Markdown

GitHub

Docs

2026-05-03

5 min read

GitHub renders `README.md` — not `README.pdf`. Convert locally with PDF to Markdown, then fix relative links manually.

Keep NDA specs in private repos; conversion never uploads, but `git push` still needs policy review.

Free Tool

Vendor README PDFs back to repo-friendly Markdown — no public API.

100% private — runs in your browser

❤️ Love this tool? Share it:

Legacy PDF briefs become content/*.md for Hugo or Eleventy — wire front matter after download.

Vendor PDF specs → Markdown in Git without shipping IP to a random SaaS converter.

Dense arXiv PDFs → Markdown for scripts, Zotero notes, and local RAG — no public extractor API.