I’ve done a similar PDF → Markdown workflow.

For each page:

- Extract text as usual.

- Capture the whole page as an image (~200 DPI).

- Optionally extract images/graphs within the page and include them in the same LLM call.

- Optionally add a bit of context from neighboring pages.

Then wrap everything with a clear prompt (structured output + how you want graphs handled), and you’re set.

At this point, models like GPT-5-nano/mini or Gemini 2.5 Flash are cheap and strong enough to make this practical.

Yeah, it’s a bit like using a rocket launcher on a mosquito, but this is actually very easy to implement and quite flexible and powerfuL. works across almost any format, Markdown is both AI and human friendly, and surprisingly maintainable.

>are cheap and strong enough to make this practical.

It all depends on the scale you need them, with the API it's easy to generate millions of tokens without thinking.