markitdown

markitdown is a skill for Claude Code from 0xDarkMatter/claude-mods. It costs 78 tokens per session (800 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command-line tool for turning local documents and media into Markdown, a plain-text format commonly used for notes and documentation. It supports PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, presentations, images, web pages, text files, and audio.

In plain words
What is it for?
Converting PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, CSV, JSON, and images into Markdown, including OCR for images and speech-to-text for audio.
Why use it?
It gives you one way to extract readable text and tables from different file types instead of handling each format separately.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter.

Part of the claude-mods plugin — 103 skills, 3 commands, 3 agents, 4 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown
Any agent
npx skills add 0xDarkMatter/claude-mods --skill markitdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/0xDarkMatter/claude-mods

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install claude-mods, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 103 skills, 3 commands, 3 agents, 4 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for markitdown

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 78 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 800 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00078 $0.00800
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00400
Sonnet 5 $0.00016 $0.00160
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00080

Measured 6d ago against content hash de29e4dc6cc6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

markitdown scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 6d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/markitdown/SKILL.md · 96 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 96 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

markitdown - Document to Markdown

Convert local documents to clean Markdown. One tool for PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, and more.

When to Use markitdown

Use Case Recommendation
Local files (PDF, Word, Excel) Use markitdown - unique capability
Web pages ❌ Use Jina (r.jina.ai/) - 5x faster
Blocked/anti-bot sites ❌ Use Firecrawl
OCR on images Use markitdown
Audio transcription Use markitdown

Basic Usage

# Local files (primary use case)
markitdown document.pdf
markitdown report.docx
markitdown data.xlsx
markitdown slides.pptx
markitdown screenshot.png    # OCR

# URLs (works, but Jina is faster)
markitdown https://example.com

# Save output
markitdown document.pdf > document.md

Supported Formats

Format Extensions Notes
PDF .pdf Text extraction, tables
Word .docx Formatting preserved
Excel .xlsx Tables to markdown
PowerPoint .pptx Slides as sections
Images .jpg, .png OCR text extraction
HTML .html Clean conversion
Audio .mp3, .wav Speech-to-text
Text .txt, .csv, .json, .xml Pass-through/structure
URLs https://... Works but slower than Jina

Benchmarked Performance (URLs)

Tool Avg Speed Success Rate
Jina 0.5s 10/10
markitdown 2.5s 9/10
Firecrawl 4.5s 10/10

Verdict: For URLs, use Jina. For local files, markitdown is the only option.

Examples

# PDF to markdown (primary use case)
markitdown report.pdf > report.md

# Excel spreadsheet
markitdown financials.xlsx

# Image with text (OCR)
markitdown screenshot.png

# PowerPoint deck
markitdown presentation.pptx > slides.md

# Audio transcription
markitdown meeting.mp3 > transcript.md

Comparison with Alternatives

Task markitdown Alternative
PDF text markitdown file.pdf PyMuPDF, pdfplumber
Word docs markitdown file.docx python-docx
Excel markitdown file.xlsx pandas, openpyxl
OCR markitdown image.png Tesseract
Web pages Use Jina instead r.jina.ai/URL (5x faster)

Read the full file on GitHub · 96 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 6d ago First seen · 96 lines · 78 tokens per session scan A de29e4dc6cc6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

markitdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository 0xDarkMatter/claude-mods (32 stars, last pushed 13d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 78 tokens to every session and 800 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.