Some PDF files can be “tagged” which means they contain information about the structure of the file. This structure is embedded as metadata within the PDF and is made up of a hierarchy of tags that label elements such as headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and images.
This is very similar to HTML where text is contained within elements that have meaning, such as <p> for paragraph, or <table> for table.
If a PDF file does contain structured content (also known as marked content), then it can be processed and converted into other formats.
What is Markdown?
Markdown is a lightweight text-based markup language used to format plain text so it can be converted into rich text. It is simple to write and easy to read without rendering.
It is commonly used on blogs, forums, LLMs, documentation and many other places.
PDF vs Markdown
Both formats serve distinct purposes, PDF preserves the fixed visual layout of a document, making it ideal for sharing print-ready content like reports, contracts and official documents. It is widely used when consistent appearance and layout across devices are critical, and is one of the most universally supported document formats.
Markdown is similar in that it is great for sharing content however the appearance and layout of documents is not guaranteed to be the same for different renderers.
Text in Markdown format can be easily extracted and parsed by software due to its simplicity, but PDF files are a lot more complicated. Markdown is also best suited to be crawled by AI technologies like LLMs due to its simple nature.
Converting Structured PDF files to Markdown
Recently, we added PDF to Markdown support to JPedal. If your PDF file contains structured content (how do I know?), then JPedal will be able to convert it to Markdown using the following code snippet:
ExtractStructuredTextProperties properties = new ExtractStructuredTextProperties();
properties.setFileOutputMode(OutputModes.MARKDOWN);
ExtractStructuredText.
writeAllStructuredTextOutlinesToDir("inputFile.pdf", password, "outputFolder", null, null);
Learn more about tagged PDF files.
Learn more about JPedal, our powerful PDF toolkit.
This guide demonstrated how to convert structured PDF files into Markdown format using just a few lines of Java code. It also highlighted the key differences between PDF and Markdown to help you determine which format best suits your needs.
For more in-depth insights into PDFs, feel free to explore our other articles — we’ve been working with the format for over a decade!