PDF to Text vs PDF to Markdown

The short version

Both pipelines start with the same PDF. PDF to Clean Text strips everything down to paragraphs — fastest path to "paste into ChatGPT and ask a question." PDF to Markdown goes further: it preserves heading hierarchy, lists, and code blocks so the document survives a trip into Obsidian, GitHub, or a vector store.

Side-by-side

When to use plain text

• You're pasting into a single ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini conversation.
• You want the smallest possible token bill.
• The document is mostly prose — a memo, a contract, a long email thread.
• You'll feed it through Context Compressor next anyway.

When to use Markdown

• You're building a RAG knowledge base — heading boundaries make better chunk splits.
• The destination is Obsidian, Notion, GitHub, or any docs system.
• The PDF has structure worth keeping: a textbook, a spec, a tutorial, a report with sections.
• You want to use the same source for both human reading and LLM context.

Mixing both

Many real workflows use both. Convert a 200-page handbook to Markdown for the knowledge base, then export individual chapters as plain text for one-off summarization. Batch Document Extractor handles either output format and processes whole folders at once — useful when a knowledge base spans dozens of files.

Bottom line

Default to plain text for chat. Default to Markdown the moment structure matters. Both tools run entirely in your browser, so try the same PDF through each and compare token counts with the Token Counter — the difference is usually obvious in 10 seconds.