PDF to Markdown

Convert a PDF to clean markdown: headings, paragraphs, and bullets reconstructed from the text layer - ready to drop into a model's context. Body: {"url":"https://…/file.pdf"}.

Input

Example output

{
  "pages": 15,
  "wordCount": 4500,
  "markdown": "## Attention Is All You Need\n\nThe dominant sequence…"
}

Try it - see the 402 challenge (free)

curl -i -X POST https://agent402.tools/api/pdf-to-markdown \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762"}'

The response is HTTP 402 Payment Required with exact payment requirements. Any x402 v2 client pays automatically and retries:

Paid call (JavaScript agent)

import { wrapFetchWithPayment } from "@x402/fetch";
import { x402Client } from "@x402/core/client";
import { registerExactEvmScheme } from "@x402/evm/exact/client";
import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";

const client = new x402Client();
registerExactEvmScheme(client, { signer: privateKeyToAccount(KEY) });
const payFetch = wrapFetchWithPayment(fetch, client);

const res = await payFetch("https://agent402.tools/api/pdf-to-markdown", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { "Content-Type": "application/json" },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    "url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762"
  }),
});

Part of these workflows

This tool is one step in 4 curated multi-tool workflows - agents can fetch the whole sequence as an MCP prompt or call https://agent402.tools/api/skill-packs/{slug}/prompt.

• Content extraction - Turn arbitrary URLs and PDFs into clean structured text - articles, page metadata, PDF pages, OCR'd images, browser-rendered SPAs.
• Document intelligence - Turn any PDF or image URL into structured data - metadata, extracted text, sliced page ranges, OCR for scanned docs, decoded barcodes / QR codes - without falling back to a vision LLM guess. Built for the messy 30% of documents where pdf-to-markdown alone returns nothing useful.
• Convert anything to markdown - Convert anything at a URL - HTML, PDF, or an image - to clean markdown. The 'I have a URL but it might be any content-type, give me markdown either way' workflow: HEAD-detect the content-type, branch to the right deterministic extractor (article extract for HTML, pdf-to-markdown for PDFs, OCR for images), and report token/word stats on the output so the caller can budget the result against an LLM context window.
• PDF processing pipeline - Full PDF processing pipeline - metadata, markdown conversion, and first-page extraction in one call.

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