doc2md-lite

Free tool that turns a text PDF or a saved web page (.html) into clean Markdown. Tables stay real Markdown tables. Need Word files, chunks for AI search (RAG), whole folders or page ranges? The paid version does that: doc2md on Gumroad

Runs on your own computer, so your files are never uploaded anywhere. MIT license. Python 3.10 or newer, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Install

pip install doc2md-lite

Or use pipx, which keeps it in its own space:

pipx install doc2md-lite

Want the newest code from GitHub instead?

pip install git+https://github.com/tidybytetools/doc2md-lite

Use it

doc2md-lite report.pdf                 # writes report.md
doc2md-lite page.html -o page.md
doc2md-lite report.pdf -o -            # print the Markdown on screen
doc2md-lite report.pdf --tables text   # also find tables with no border lines

Example run:

Saved: report.md  (4 headings, 1 tables)

What you get from a PDF:

# Spring Store Report

Our team checked every store in March. Most stores met the new goal...

## Sales by region

| Region | Stores | Sales |
| --- | --- | --- |
| North | 12 | $48,200 |
| South | 9 | $39,950 |

What it keeps: headings (found by font size and bold in PDFs), paragraphs, bullet and numbered lists, tables, and in HTML also bold, italic, links and code blocks. From web pages it drops scripts, styles, menus and footers.

When you run it in a terminal it ends with one short line about the paid version. --quiet turns it off, and it never shows when output is piped or redirected.

Known limits

• Scanned PDFs. Pages that are just an image (no text layer) are skipped, and the tool tells you which ones.
• Headings in PDFs are a best guess from font size and bold. Odd layouts may need a quick fix.
• Two-column PDFs (like science papers) may mix the columns.
• One file at a time. No folders, no page ranges, no Word files, no RAG chunks. The paid version has those.
• Files only. It does not download web pages. Save the page first.

Lite vs paid

Other good free tools

Pick what fits you. MarkItDown reads many more file types. pandoc is great for Word and HTML but does not read PDFs. pymupdf4llm is fast on PDFs but uses the AGPL license. doc2md-lite is small, MIT, keeps PDF tables as tables, and has an MCP server built in.

Use it from Claude Desktop or Cursor (MCP)

There is a small free MCP server built in. It gives your AI app one tool, convert_to_markdown. It needs uv.

Run it by hand to check it starts (it waits quietly for an app to talk to it):

uvx --from doc2md-lite doc2md-lite-mcp

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doc2md-lite": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "doc2md-lite", "doc2md-lite-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tool: convert_to_markdown(path, tables="lines", output_path=""). It returns the Markdown text. If you set output_path, it saves the file there and returns the path instead.

For AI agents

• Use when: you have a local PDF with real text (you can select the words) or a saved HTML file, and you want Markdown to read or store.
• Don't use when: the PDF is a scan, the file is .docx, or you need many files or chunks with page numbers. Use the paid version for those.
• Input: a file path, plus optional tables (lines, text, off).
• Output: Markdown text. Tables are Markdown tables with the first row as the header.
• CLI exit code is 0 on success and 1 on error (message on stderr, or {"ok": false, "error": ...} with --json). See also llms.txt.

Python

from doc2md_lite import convert
md, info = convert("report.pdf")   # info: type, tables, headings, scanned_pages

Tests

pip install pdfplumber beautifulsoup4 reportlab "mcp<2"
python3 -m unittest discover tests

License

MIT. See LICENSE.