Roadmap
What works today, and where this is going
I’m building pdf·markdown in the open, on my own — just me and a keyboard 👨💻. So here’s the honest status — what it already does well, what still breaks, and what I’m working on next.
No roadmap theater, no dates I can’t keep. Just where things actually stand, kept current as it changes. If a PDF comes out wrong, that’s not a footnote here — it’s the point of this page. Telling me is the fastest way to get it fixed.
What it does well right now
- Text-based PDFs. Articles, docs, books with a real text layer come through as clean, structured Markdown.
- Headings, lists & simple tables. The structure survives — not a flat wall of text.
- Embedded images. Pictures stored as real images are pulled out and kept in place.
- Chinese, Japanese & Korean. CJK text comes through well, not just Latin scripts. Need another language? Tell me and I’ll look into it.
- Everyday math. Common formulas come through, rendered with KaTeX rather than flattened into plain text.
- Side-by-side proofreading. The original PDF and the Markdown sit next to each other, so checking the result takes seconds.
- Private by default. The whole conversion runs in your browser. Your file is never uploaded — there’s nothing for me to see.
Where it’s still rough
The honest list of where conversions can break today. If you hit one of these, I’d rather you knew going in.
- Complex formulas. Everyday math is fine; dense or unusual notation can still drift.
- Complex, multi-page tables. Simple tables survive; ones that span pages or nest cells can collapse or misalign.
- Dense multi-column layouts. Papers and reports can read out of order when the columns get tight.
- Figures that aren’t real images. Diagrams drawn as vector graphics — not stored as image files — are hard to lift out cleanly.
- Scanned PDFs (OCR). OCR works, but it isn’t great yet — results from scans still vary.
- Very large files. Hundreds of pages can be slow, since it all runs on your own machine.
A few of these run up against what a browser tab can realistically do. I’m still hunting for better in-browser ways to handle them — and some may ultimately depend on the server-side option below.
Hit one of these? Tell me which file broke — that’s what moves it up the list. I never see your file unless you choose to attach it.
What I’m working on next
Roughly ordered, not scheduled. What you tell me reshuffles it.
Now
- Tightening table fidelity — the single most-reported rough spot.
- Smoothing the proofread-and-fix pass so corrections are quicker.
Next
- Better OCR, so scanned PDFs convert more reliably.
- Better handling of multi-column academic layouts.
Maybe
- Converting several files in one go.
- A server-side option for the heavy jobs (more below).
The bigger picture: a server-side option, maybe
Everything a browser can do, I want to do as well as it can be done — and your files will always stay on your machine here. That’s the whole point.
But several of the hard cases above — better OCR, complex tables and formulas, vector-drawn figures, big batches — are genuinely tough inside a browser tab. For those, there may one day be an optional server-side path to pick up where the browser runs out of room.
Two honest caveats: it’s a direction, not a dated promise — and a server path means your file would leave your device, so it’d always be a clearly-marked choice, never the default. The in-browser tool stays the free, private main event regardless. Whether I build the server side at all, and what it should do, depends on what you tell me you actually need.
Recently shipped
- Jun 2026 Math holds together better — exponents and subscripts now survive, and a formula that can’t render cleanly falls back to readable text instead of broken symbols.
- Jun 2026 Images with transparent backgrounds no longer come out black — they sit on white, the way they looked in the PDF.
- Jun 2026 Figure captions now stay with their image, centered underneath — instead of breaking off as a stray line of text.
- Jun 2026 Markdown → PDF, with a set of clean export themes — the other direction, same page. Try it →
- Jun 2026 A built-in sample PDF, so you can see the quality before bringing your own file.
- Jun 2026 More reliable exports — waits for fonts to load, so text no longer comes out blank.
- Jun 2026 Sample files no longer hang on slow connections (download progress + a timeout).
This page is only honest if you help keep it that way. If something broke, felt clunky, or you wish it did one more thing — that’s exactly what I want to hear.