PDF Conversion for AI Agents
The PDF
Becomes Real Markdown
Turns a PDF into clean Markdown or text through the RunPulse API, batching pages in parallel and skipping blank ones so you’re not paying to convert nothing.
A PDF looks like text but isn’t. Scanned pages, garbled tables, locked files trip up whatever’s reading it.
The external problem
You hand an agent a PDF and it either chokes on the layout, turns a table into word soup, or returns nothing at all because the pages are scanned images with no real text underneath.
The internal problem
You end up copy-pasting sections by hand, or squinting at a scan yourself, because you can’t trust the extraction to have gotten it right.
What's at stake
Time lost re-typing what the PDF already said, or worse, a decision made on a table that got quietly mangled in the extraction.
Four steps take a PDF from filtered pages to one file.
Point it at a PDF and an output folder; it walks you through creating a RunPulse account and API key the first time, then runs from the command line after that.
Filter & Batch
The script reads each page locally with pypdf and skips anything under 20 characters of extractable text, catching blanks and image-only pages before they hit the paid API. What survives gets grouped into consecutive batches.
Parallel Extraction
Every batch fires at RunPulse’s /extract endpoint at once and gets polled until it’s done, so a 100-page PDF doesn’t wait on itself page by page.
Handle Edge Cases
Owner-locked PDFs get decrypted automatically; a fully scanned PDF just needs --no-skip so OCR runs on every page instead of getting filtered out as blank.
Reassemble & Save
Batches get stitched back together in the right page order into one Markdown or text file, with page-range comments marking what came from where.
Use it now. It's free.
Works on all platforms. Pick yours and get set up in under a minute.
Download & upload in 60 seconds
One click downloads the zip and opens Claude.ai.
Click below — the zip downloads and Claude.ai opens.
Click the + button in the skills column on the left.
Select Create a skill.
Select Upload a skill and upload the zip.
Start your pdf conversion by running /estack-pdf-to-md.
PDF to Markdown ships in E-Stack, a set of 20 free skills installed by one command. See the whole stack.