Parse PDFs Online
Drop it in. Get results instantly.
A free online parser powered by @firecrawl/pdf-inspector-wasm. It classifies your PDF (text-based / scanned / image-based / mixed) and converts the content into clean Markdown. Everything runs inside your browser — nothing uploaded, nothing stored, gone when you close the tab.
parse pdf online
Online Demo
Drop or pick a PDF to see its detected type, then grab the Markdown.
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
Parsing runs locally in your browser — files are never uploaded
pdf-inspector
Why a local-first online tool
Most online PDF tools upload your file to their servers. This one doesn't.
🔒 Files never leave your device
The WebAssembly engine is downloaded into your browser with the page; the PDF stays on your machine the whole time. Safe for contracts, financial reports, and medical records.
🆓 Free, truly unlimited
No account, no page caps, no daily quotas, no watermarks. Parsing happens on your own hardware, so there's no server bill to pass on to you.
⚡ Second-level responses
Text-based PDFs finish in under 200ms; classification takes ~10–50ms. Speed depends on your device, not a queue on someone else's server.
pdf-inspector
What this tool does
One drop, two deliverables: a health check and the content
📄 Know if your PDF is readable
Get a TextBased / Scanned / ImageBased / Mixed verdict with a confidence score. Scanned files are flagged as needing OCR instead of coming back as garbage.
📝 Extract text as Markdown
Heading levels, multi-column reading order, lists, tables, and links are reconstructed as GitHub-Flavored Markdown — ready to paste into notes or feed to RAG.
🛡️ Zero-upload architecture
You can verify it yourself in DevTools: apart from the engine itself, no request containing file content ever leaves the tab. See our privacy policy.
💾 Copy / download .md
Copy the Markdown preview in one click or download it as a .md file; page markers stay in the text so you can trace results back to source pages.
pdf-inspector
Use cases
From everyday office work to AI data engineering
- Papers & reports: two-column papers come out in correct reading order, paste cleanly into Obsidian or Notion.
- RAG preprocessing: Markdown with heading levels and tables is ideal chunking material for retrieval-augmented generation.
- Sensitive documents: contracts and statements never leave your machine — compliance-friendly by design.
- Pipeline spot-checks: verify document types and conversion quality online before wiring up batch automation.
💡 Need batch automation? Grab the CLI or a library from the install page, usage in the quick-start guide.
pdf-inspector
FAQ
Common questions about the online parser.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The WebAssembly engine parses inside your browser; the file lives only in the current tab's memory and is released when you close the page. This site has no backend that could receive files.
Are there page-count or size limits?
No artificial ones. The practical ceiling is your device's memory (the tab's available RAM); documents of several hundred pages are fine.
Does it work on scanned PDFs?
The browser demo includes no OCR — it will clearly report the scan and explain why. The native packages (Rust / Node.js / Python) ship optional selective OCR for just the pages that need it. See Is my PDF text-based or scanned?.
How accurate is the result?
The online demo runs the same engine as the open-source library: #1 overall score of 0.875 on the official opendataloader-bench, also first in tables and reading order — details on the benchmark page.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes. Any modern mobile browser supports WebAssembly — just open this page; landscape orientation helps for reading long Markdown output.
Go further
Like it?
Put it in your project.
Distributed via npm / PyPI / crates.io, plus a CLI for batch jobs.
MIT licensed, free for commercial use.