PaperLab PDF to Markdown User Guide

Welcome to PaperLab’s Open MVP, our first step towards making your research workflow smarter, faster, and more accurate.

At PaperLab, our goal is simple: Help researchers get cleaner, AI-ready data at minimal cost.

Why PDFs Are Secretly Failing Your AI

When Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems process PDFs directly, the results can often be unreliable:

• Text may be parsed incorrectly

• Equations can break

• Tables may lose structure

• Inaccuracies can appear in responses

PaperLab solves this problem by converting PDFs into Markdown (.md) files, a lightweight, structured format that LLMs understand better. With this process, you can explore every element of a document, from headings and handwriting to equations and tables, in a cleaner, more precise way.

Get Started in 4 Simple Steps 

Step 1: Access the Dashboard

Go to the platform here.

Step 2: Sign Up

·     Create a free account.

·     After sign-up, share a short story about why you want to use PaperLab and receive 50 free credits.

-       1 credit = 1 page

-       Additional credits can be purchased once your free credits are used.

paperlab pdf2md

Step 3: Upload Your PDF

Choose the research paper or document you want to convert.

upload your pdf here to transform it to markdown

Step 4: Download Your Clean, AI Ready Package

You will receive a package containing:

• A Markdown (.md) file

• Figures and images

your .md package

Why Markdown is a Game Changer

Markdown is a format designed for clarity and structure, which makes it highly effective for AI systems.

• Lightweight files that upload easily to RAGs

• Preserves headings, equations, and tables with semantic meaning

• Improves chunking and reduces errors

Raw PDFs often break structure, sometimes without you realizing it.

Let’s see an example:

Below is a table example from this paper.

table example from pdf paper

Now, we can compare how ChatGPT understands this table with a PDF and how it understands with a Markdown file. 

what ChatGPT understands from a pdf file

what ChatGPT understands from a markdown file

You can see that when a PDF is uploaded into ChatGPT, it showed the wrong number and equation altogether while the Markdown was understood correctly. A very small error which we might not pay attention to.

Why PaperLab?

• Affordable: High-quality parsing at minimal cost

• Reliable: Cleaner outputs, fewer errors

• Future-Proof: Upcoming RAG system for building queryable knowledge bases

Start Converting Smarter Today

Unlock AI-ready research with PaperLab’s new product.

reliable pdf to markdown with PaperLab