How to Get PDFs Into Obsidian or Notion as Markdown

You've got a pile of PDFs (papers, course notes, reports, manuals) and you want them in your notes app. You don't just want them stored there. You want them as notes: something you can edit, highlight, link to and search alongside everything else.

Both Obsidian and Notion are built around Markdown, so the cleanest route is the same for both: convert the PDF to Markdown first, then import the Markdown. Here's why, and the exact steps for each app.

Why not just drop the PDF in?

You can, but you get something different from a note.

• In Obsidian, a PDF sits in your vault as an attachment. You can open and read it, but its contents aren't a note: you can't edit the text, add your own headings, or link to one of its sections from another note.
• In Notion, importing a PDF does turn it into a page, but Notion warns that formatting may change: headings and quotes can come through as plain text, and tables become simple tables. The PDF limit is 5 MB on the free plan and 20 MB on paid plans (checked November 2026).

Markdown sidesteps both problems. A # heading is a heading in Obsidian and in Notion. A - list is a list. The structure arrives intact because it's written into the file itself, not reconstructed by the importer.

Step 1: Convert the PDF to Markdown

1. Open the PDF to Markdown converter, or use the converter at the bottom of this page.
2. Drop in your PDF (up to 20 MB). Signed in, you can drop in up to 10 files at once.
3. Skim the result. Check that the headings and section order look right before importing.
4. Click Download .md to save a .md file named after your PDF.

The preview works without an account. A free account gets you the full document and the download.

Two things to know before you start:

• Scanned PDFs won't convert. If you can't select the text in the PDF with your cursor, it's an image of text, and it needs OCR first. For a page or two, the image to Markdown converter will read screenshots of the pages.
• Check tables against the original. Body text, headings and lists convert well, but tables are the hardest thing to pull out of any PDF. If a table matters, compare it with the source.

Step 2a: Import into Obsidian

An Obsidian vault is just a folder of Markdown files on your computer, so importing is mostly moving files. Obsidian's own docs give three ways:

Drag and drop: drag the .md file from your Downloads folder into Obsidian's file explorer, onto the folder where you want it.

Copy into the vault folder: move the file into your vault folder using Finder or File Explorer. Obsidian picks it up automatically.

Importer plugin (for many files at once):

1. Go to Settings → Community plugins and install Importer.
2. Enable it, then open Importer from the command palette or the ribbon icon.
3. Under File format, choose Markdown (.md, .zip).
4. Pick your files, folders or a .zip of them, review the preview, and select Import.

Once it's in, the PDF's headings show up in the outline, you can link to a section with [[Note name#Heading]], and the full text is in Obsidian's search.

Tip: keep the original PDF next to the note. Drop it in an attachments folder and add a line like Source: ![[original.pdf]] at the top of the note. You get the editable text and the original layout side by side.

Step 2b: Import into Notion

From Notion's import guide:

1. In the sidebar, click Settings, then Import.
2. Choose Text & Markdown.
3. Upload your .md file. You can select several at once.

You can also import from inside a page: click the ••• menu at the top right, then More → Import.

The Text & Markdown importer accepts files up to 5 MB on the free plan and 50 MB on paid plans. That's plenty, because a 100-page PDF usually becomes a Markdown file well under 1 MB. To bring in a whole folder and keep its structure, zip it and use Notion's ZIP import.

Which route should you use?

	Drop the PDF in	Convert to Markdown, then import
Editable text	Obsidian: no. Notion: yes	Yes, in both
Headings kept	Notion: may become plain text	Yes
Link to a section	No	Yes (Obsidian [[Note#Heading]], Notion headings)
Searchable with your other notes	Notion only	Yes, in both
Original layout	Kept	Lost, so keep the PDF alongside
Scanned PDFs	Not searchable without OCR	Need OCR first

For a document you'll only ever read, dropping the PDF in is fine. For anything you'll annotate, quote, link to or build on, convert it first.

Next: use your notes with AI

Once your PDFs are clean Markdown notes, they're also ready for AI tools: paste a note into ChatGPT or Claude, or load a folder into NotebookLM. See how to prepare documents for NotebookLM, Claude Projects & custom GPTs, and why ChatGPT sometimes can't read a PDF for what goes wrong when you skip the conversion.

Convert your first PDF

Drop a PDF below to see the Markdown you'd be importing. The preview needs no account.