Converting a PDF to Markdown with poppler-utils and pandoc

Reference guide: convert-pdf-to-markdown-linux

Experience 1: Installation

Result: poppler-utils and pandoc are installed.

Explanation:

sudo apt install poppler-utils pandoc

Experience 2: Converting the PDF to text and extracting images

Result: The PDF is converted to a text file and images are extracted.

Explanation:

pdftotext -layout ../corebook.pdf corebook.txt
pdfimages -all ../corebook.pdf images/image

• pdftotext -layout preserves the text layout.
• pdfimages -all extracts all images from the PDF into the images/ directory.

Experience 3: Converting to Markdown with pandoc

Result: Two Markdown files are generated (corebook.md and corebook-f.md). The difference between the two is minimal.

Explanation:

pandoc -t markdown corebook.txt -o corebook.md
pandoc -f markdown corebook.txt -o corebook-f.md

The -t and -f options produce very similar output in this case. The reformatting is minimal.

Conclusion

The git repository of the book was cloned afterwards to work directly from source:

git clone git@github.com:tinycorelinux/corebook.git

It is easier to work from source.

Other useful commands

# List pandoc supported input formats
pandoc --list-input-formats | paste -sd,
biblatex,bibtex,bits,commonmark,commonmark_x,creole,csljson,csv,docbook,docx,dokuwiki,endnotexml,epub,fb2,gfm,haddock,html,ipynb,jats,jira,json,latex,man,markdown,markdown_github,markdown_mmd,markdown_phpextra,markdown_strict,mediawiki,muse,native,odt,opml,org,ris,rst,rtf,t2t,textile,tikiwiki,tsv,twiki,typst,vimwiki

# Direct PDF to Markdown conversion in one command
pdftotext input.pdf - | pandoc -t markdown -o output.md