Pdf-to-Markdown CLI
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Hi HN! I'm proud to share that we've launched a free PDF-to-Markdown CLI built on our proprietary (you might know it from PSPDFKit) engine.Most extractors are either fast but lose structure (markitdown, pymupdf4llm) or accurate but slow (docling). Ours ties with docling on accuracy but is orders of magnitude faster.https://github.com/pspdfkit/pdf-to-markdownWe'd love feedback on it, and ofc send us files that break it.
HN · launched Apr 2, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views
Niche: document and file conversion tools · 216 launches, 24 in the last 7 days ▼ -4% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
More like this: all 216 launches in document and file conversion tools →
Could you build this?
No High-accuracy, high-speed PDF layout analysis and markdown extraction requires proprietary document processing engines built on years of C/C++ rendering engineering (like PSPDFKit) to handle diverse fonts, tables, and nested layouts.
What it would actually take: The architecture involves an optimized low-level PDF parsing engine (often C++) capable of extracting glyph positions, bounding boxes, vector lines, and tabular structures, combined with heuristics or vision-language models for reading order reconstruction. Developing this requires deep expertise in PDF specifications (ISO 32000), computer vision table-extraction algorithms, and high-performance cross-platform binary optimization.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 936 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #902 of 937 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 130 days after the earliest competitor.
- Markdown to PDF CLI Tool · hn · 2026-07-04 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.63
- TokDown · ph · 2026-09-23 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- MD PDF Converter · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.60
- PDF To Markdown · ph · 2026-10-17 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- PDF to Markdown that preserves layout, images, and tables · hn · 2026-01-02 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Mdpdf a 2k line C CLI to convert Markdown to tiny PDFs · hn · 2026-04-09 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- PDF to MD · ph · 2026-09-10 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Pdf2md · hn · 2026-05-18 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.54
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