How to Convert PDFs to Markdown for RAG and Chatbots, and When to Skip It

Markdown preserves headings, lists and tables as plain text, making it a practical intermediate format between PDFs and vector stores. PDFs with a real text layer convert cleanly, while scanned documents require OCR first. Tables, multi-column layouts and repeated headers are common failure points, so outputs should be checked before embedding. The article notes that headings provide natural chunk boundaries, support smaller context and enable source citations. It also advises checking for a text layer with a viewer or a PyMuPDF script, and compares a web converter for single documents with open-source libraries for batch jobs.