---
title: "Documents, parsed"
description: "The markitdown.ai blog is a collection of practical notes on turning PDFs, Office files, scans, and web pages into Markdown for models, RAG pipelines, and agents — the failure modes we see and how conversion fixes them."
url: https://markitdown.ai/blog
updated: 2026-06-12
source: markitdown.ai
---

# Documents, parsed

> The markitdown.ai blog is a collection of practical notes on turning PDFs, Office files, scans, and web pages into Markdown for models, RAG pipelines, and agents — the failure modes we see and how conversion fixes them.

## Posts

- [Why PDFs break LLMs — and what clean Markdown fixes](https://markitdown.ai/blog/why-pdfs-break-llms) — 2026-06-12 — A PDF that looks perfect to a human often falls apart the moment a model reads it. Here's what goes wrong, and why converting to clean Markdown first makes downstream AI far more reliable.
- [A practical checklist for preparing documents for RAG](https://markitdown.ai/blog/preparing-documents-for-rag) — 2026-06-09 — Retrieval quality is decided long before the vector database. This is a pre-processing checklist for turning messy source documents into clean, chunk-ready text.
- [Markdown vs plain text for LLM context — why structure wins](https://markitdown.ai/blog/markdown-vs-plain-text-for-llms) — 2026-06-05 — Plain text throws away the structure a model could have used. Markdown keeps it, at almost no token cost — and that changes how reliably an LLM can reason over your content.

## Related

- [Document Parsing](https://markitdown.ai/blog/category/parsing)
- [RAG & Pipelines](https://markitdown.ai/blog/category/rag)
- [LLMs & Markdown](https://markitdown.ai/blog/category/llms)