The copy-paste problem this solves
Anyone who has pasted PDF text straight into a CMS or rich-text editor knows what happens next: stray formatting, weird line breaks in the middle of sentences, font tags that don't match the site's style, and a heading that pastes in as a giant bold paragraph instead of an actual heading element. Cleaning that up by hand for a multi-page document is genuinely tedious work that adds nothing of value.
The alternative is extracting the PDF's text with its structure already inferred — real heading tags where the content was actually a heading, real paragraph tags everywhere else — so what lands in your CMS is markup a browser (and a screen reader, and a search engine) already understands correctly, without a manual cleanup pass.
How a PDF, which has no concept of "headings," gets structured
This is worth understanding because it explains both what works well and what occasionally doesn't: a PDF file has no native idea of headings or paragraphs, only text positioned at specific coordinates with a specific font size. Structure gets inferred by comparing each line's font size against the median size on that page — lines noticeably larger than the surrounding text become headings, everything else becomes a paragraph.
This works well for typically-formatted documents (a clear, larger title, normal-sized body text) and less predictably for documents with unusual formatting choices, like body text set in a large decorative font throughout — in that edge case, review the output before publishing rather than assuming every heading tag landed correctly.
What you get is a clean starting point, not a finished page
It's worth being clear-eyed about scope: this produces plain semantic HTML — headings and paragraphs, properly escaped so ampersands and angle brackets in your source text don't break the output markup — with zero styling, images, tables, or layout carried over from the PDF. That's a deliberate trade-off, not a limitation to work around: styling belongs in your site's CSS, not baked into imported content, and keeping the two separate is exactly what makes the output easy to drop into an existing page design.
If a document has embedded images you need too, those have to come from a separate extraction — this tool structures text only. And if the source PDF is a scanned document with no actual text layer underneath (just a picture of a page), there's nothing here for a text extractor to find; that case needs OCR first.
A practical workflow for migrating documents to a website
For migrating a batch of PDF documents into a blog or knowledge base, the fastest reliable workflow is: convert each PDF to HTML here, paste the output into your CMS's HTML/source view (not the visual editor, which can re-mangle clean markup), then apply your site's actual styling and add back any images manually. This keeps the text accurate and the structure semantic while letting your CMS handle presentation the way it's meant to.