@trendtech33566: [Saved Version] For those who want to turn URLs or PDFs into clean Markdown PullMD, about 400. Here's what it can do ・C…

[Saved Version] For those who want to turn URLs or PDFs into clean Markdown: PullMD, about 400 (stars). Here’s what it can do:

• Convert web pages to Markdown without ads or decorations
• Supports PDF/Office/EPUB/images/audio/YouTube and more
• Includes REST API / MCP server / PWA
• Self-hostable, and easy to integrate with AI agents

An open-source project that instantly takes care of “standardizing information in Markdown.” It’ll resonate with people building RAG preprocessing or AI workflows.

What’s new in v3

PullMD v3 grows from a web-page reader into a general anything-to-Markdown service for agents, with a leaner default output. Everything beyond plain web extraction is opt-in and degrades gracefully - left unconfigured, v3 handles web pages exactly like v2, just with a cleaner body by default.

• Clean body by default - the Markdown body is now just # Title + content. The source URL, fetch date, and all metadata moved into the YAML frontmatter, so nothing is duplicated and you spend fewer tokens. Reddit posts follow the same rule: subreddit, author, upvotes, and publish date live in the frontmatter (subreddit, author, upvotes, published), not the body. This is the one breaking change: set PULLMD_SOURCE_HEADER=true to restore the old inline header, and use PULLMD_FRONTMATTER_FIELDS to trim which fields are emitted. See MIGRATION.md.
• Documents → Markdown - PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB and more, by URL or upload (POST /api/file, drag-and-drop in the PWA).
• High-quality PDF tables (OCR) - an opt-in, vendor-neutral OCR tier (?pdf=ocr) for table-grade PDF conversion, with automatic fallback to the free path.
• Images & audio → Markdown - opt-in captioning and transcription via any OpenAI-compatible or local model; runs inside pullmd, no extra container required.
• YouTube transcripts - title, description and transcript with clickable timecodes, no API key required.
• Richer frontmatter - extraction source, quality, and (for media/OCR) model + token/page usage for cost tracking, plus a configurable field allowlist.

Self-hosters upgrading from v2.x: the clean-body change is the only breaking one - MIGRATION.md has the one-line opt-out. Everything else is additive.

Added in the 3.x line since then:

• Hacker News pipeline (3.1) - items, comment permalinks and listings through a purpose-built converter, plus Web Share and an instant frontmatter toggle in the PWA.
• X-Transcript-Status (3.2) - tells a transient YouTube rate-limit apart from a genuinely missing transcript.
• SSRF protection (3.3) - private, loopback, link-local, CGNAT and cloud-metadata targets are rejected by default, on every fetch path and every redirect hop.
• Query-scoped extraction (3.4) - ?query= returns only the sections relevant to a question, with a max_tokens budget.
• Site recipes opened up (3.5/3.6) - JSON-LD-to-frontmatter, a contributor guide, and select.content so a recipe can name the article body outright.
• Coverage guard (3.7) - recovers pages where extraction kept only a sliver of the body; see PULLMD_COVERAGE_GUARD.
• Account controls (3.8) - a non-admin can clear entries from their own history, self-registration can be closed with PULLMD_ALLOW_SIGNUP, and scripts/admin.js create-user creates accounts from the shell.
• Download button (3.9) - the PWA saves a result as a .md file, named by the server via X-Suggested-Filename and optionally date-prefixed.

Configuration

All variables go in .env (copy from .env.example):

v3.0.0 output format change: the markdown body is clean by default - just # Title followed by content. The source URL, fetch date, and all extraction metadata remain in the YAML frontmatter unchanged - the body no longer duplicates them. Set PULLMD_SOURCE_HEADER=true to restore the old inline header. Use PULLMD_FRONTMATTER_FIELDS to pick which frontmatter fields are emitted (handy for trimming tokens in agent pipelines).