MarkPrep

Scanned PDF to Markdown

OCR scanned PDFs into Markdown locally — no page limits, nothing uploaded.

Drop files, paste, or click to browse
PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, CSV, JSON, EPUB, images and more. Nothing is uploaded.
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Many 'scanned' PDFs already carry an invisible text layer — MarkPrep checks for it first and uses it directly, skipping OCR entirely. When a page really is an image, local Tesseract OCR reads it in your browser after deskew-friendly preprocessing. There's no page cap and no upload, unlike hosted tools that ration OCR to a handful of pages a month.

How to convert scanned pdf to markdown

  1. 1Drop your scanned PDF onto the box above, or click to browse. Nothing uploads — the file is read in your browser.
  2. 2MarkPrep converts it to Markdown locally and shows a live token count for your chosen model.
  3. 3Check the Preview, adjust the chunk size, and review the Verify tab for anything worth a second look.
  4. 4Copy the Markdown, download the .md/.zip, or export JSONL chunks for your RAG pipeline.

Format notes & gotchas

  • Turn on 'OCR scanned pages' in Options for image-only PDFs.
  • Accuracy on poor scans is below a GPU tool like Marker — see the benchmark.
  • Large scanned PDFs are CPU-heavy; desktop is faster than a phone.

Related converters

PDF to MarkdownImage to MarkdownWord to MarkdownHTML to Markdown

Frequently asked questions

How is this different from hosted OCR?+

It runs in your browser with no page limit and no upload. Hosted converters typically cap free OCR (e.g. 10 pages/month) because it costs them server time. Ours costs nothing, so there's nothing to ration.

Is my file uploaded anywhere?+

No. Conversion runs entirely in your browser tab using WebAssembly. There is no upload endpoint — open your browser's Network tab and watch: nothing leaves the page. The only labelled exceptions are fetching a public URL and optional bring-your-own-key OCR.

How much does it cost?+

Conversion and the entire AI-Ready Pack — token counts, chunking, JSONL export — are free and unlimited, because they run on your hardware. Pro ($4/mo) adds workflow features like the local MCP server, watch folders and saved profiles.

Are the token counts accurate?+

Exact for OpenAI models (GPT-4o, o-series) via their published tokenizer. For Claude and Gemini we show a labelled approximation, because those tokenizers aren't public.

Want it inside your workflow?

Conversion is free forever. Pro ($4/mo) adds the local MCP server so Claude Code converts files on your machine, plus watch folders, saved profiles and encrypted sync.

See pricing