How can I convert a PDF to Markdown locally on Microsoft Windows?

There is a tool called pdfmd that you can use as a local PDF to Markdown converter on Windows. The search results point to a few different projects with the same name.

The pdfmd project by M1ck4 is the most prominent one found and is a great option for a fully offline PDF to Markdown converter. It's designed with a focus on preserving document structure, making it useful for workflows that rely on Markdown, such as note-taking in Obsidian.

Here are its key features:

• 📄 Handles Both Text and Scanned PDFs: It can extract text natively, and for scanned documents, it integrates Tesseract OCR for text recognition, supporting 17+ languages.
• 🧠 Smart Structure Preservation: It intelligently detects headings, tables, and math equations (converting them to LaTeX) and automatically removes things like repeating headers and footers.
• 🖥️ User-Friendly GUI: It includes a modern graphical interface with dark/light themes, batch conversion support, and persistent settings. This makes it much more accessible than a pure command-line tool.

While pdfmd has a GUI, it is still a Python-based application. To use it on Windows, you have a few options:

1. Use a Standalone Executable: You can download the latest .exe file from the project's releases page on GitHub. This does not require Python, but you will still need to install Tesseract OCR separately if you plan to use the OCR feature for scanned PDFs.
2. Install via pip: If you have Python set up, you can install it as a package with the command pip install -e .[full] after cloning the repository, which will install all necessary dependencies for OCR.

Given your requirement for a free, local solution on Windows, M1ck4/pdfmd is an excellent starting point due to its GUI, intelligent parsing, and OCR support.