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If you just need to convert the files have you thought about using Zamzar (https://dev.zamzar.com/)?

We have a file conversion API that supports DOC/DOCX/ODT/PDF/TEX to Markdown conversion in one line of cURL (or you programming language of choice).

(Disclaimer: I'm the product lead for the Zamzar API).

Thanks I'll check it out. What do you do with PDFs that lock text in images, are you using ML/OCR? And as mentioned, tables?

Currently OCR support is limited to PDF > TXT conversion but we're hoping to add support for other output formats at some point. Feel free to shoot me an email at chris [at] zamzar [dot] com if you'd like to chat further.

ABBYY reader is a fine human-in-the-loop solution. It can at least output from PDF to ePub, and you can imagine going to markdown from there.

https://pd3f.com/ is a good PDF converter for the use-cases I tested (academic papers).

Anything to markdown is broader than part to markdown

Since pdfs are created so many different ways, do you have some examples and links of the pdfs that are awful?