PDF to Markdown

Convert PDFs into structured, semantic Markdown that preserves the document's logical structure — headings, tables, lists, and reading order — rather than producing flat text. This is significantly higher quality than reading a PDF directly with the read tool, which only extracts raw text without structure.

Related Nutrient skills

This is one of a family of Nutrient document skills that install separately but are built to work together (same underlying binary). When your task calls for one, add it the way your agent installs skills:

• query — to search the converted file instead of reading a large output back into context: ranked BM-25 search that returns only the top line windows. The recommended way to pull facts from big conversions ("parse once, query many").
• pdf-to-text — for plain text instead of Markdown, when column/tabular alignment must survive or the consumer can't parse Markdown.

Usage

Before running any commands, set SKILL_DIR to the absolute path of the directory containing this SKILL.md file. Use $SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-markdown in all commands below.

The $SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-markdown wrapper automatically installs the platform-specific binary into ~/.local/share/nutrient/cli/ from the CDN. It caches the binary and only checks for updates every 6 hours, so subsequent runs are fast.

Single file