Why a Scanned PDF Needs OCR Before Markdown Conversion

A PDF can contain selectable text, images of pages, or a mixture of both. That distinction matters more than the filename when converting it into Markdown.

A quick way to check the document

Open the PDF and try to select a full sentence. Paste it into a plain-text editor. If nothing is selectable, the page is likely an image. If the pasted text is garbled, its text layer may be unreliable. A single successful page does not prove that every page contains text.

What OCR adds

Optical character recognition turns the pixels in a scanned page into machine-readable text. Some OCR tools also infer layout and tables. Accuracy depends on resolution, language, skew, handwriting and the original image quality. Check important numbers and names after OCR.

What this preview does

This site uses local MarkItDown converters and does not enable OCR or cloud document analysis. It may extract existing text from a mixed PDF while missing image-only pages. An entirely empty result produces an explanatory error. Always compare the output with the original.

How to continue

Use a suitable OCR tool to create a searchable PDF, then try the converter again. MarkItDown also offers optional integrations for cloud document analysis and an OCR plugin, but those require additional configuration and may send document content to an external provider. They are not enabled on this site.