Apache Tika is a toolkit that reads many kinds of files and extracts their text and descriptive metadata, including from formats such as PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel. Applications and agent pipelines use it to turn documents into content they can process, search, or pass to language models. The catalogue skills provide reusable ways for coding agents to run Tika for file-to-Markdown extraction.
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.
npx skills add apache/tika --skill file-to-markdowngit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/apache/tikaWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/tika/file-to-markdown)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/tika/file-to-markdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apache/tika/file-to-markdown/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/apache/tika/file-to-markdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/apache/tika/file-to-markdown.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector warn
SkillSpector: 4 findings, up to medium
These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →
- medium MCP Rug Pull · line 60 Docker image references without a specific tag (:latest is implicit) or digest (@sha256:...) can be silently replaced by a malicious image.Fix: Pin the image: image:tag or image@sha256:abc123
- medium Data Exfiltration · line 68 Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
- medium Data Exfiltration · line 217 Data is being sent to an external URL. This could be legitimate telemetry or data exfiltration. Manual review is recommended.Fix: Verify the destination URL is trusted and necessary. Remove or replace with documented APIs. Ensure no secrets, tokens, or PII are transmitted.
- medium MCP Rug Pull · line 237 Docker image references without a specific tag (:latest is implicit) or digest (@sha256:...) can be silently replaced by a malicious image.Fix: Pin the image: image:tag or image@sha256:abc123
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00147 | $0.04065 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00059 | $0.01626 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00029 | $0.00813 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00407 |
Grade A, and why
file-to-markdown scanned grade A with 1 finding 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 5d 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.
Makes network callslowCapability
Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.
the tika-app CLI (zero setup, one file) or a running tika-server (curl, How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 322 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Local override: $TIKA_SKILLS_LOCAL/file-to-markdown/LOCAL.md (default ~/.tika-skills),
read after this file, wins on conflict.
Using Apache Tika from an agent
Apache Tika turns almost any document into text you can read, and reports
per-document content as Markdown by default (4.x) — the format you
actually want, not raw XML or a wall of HTML tags. See below for why to
reach for the structured rmeta view rather than a flat blob, even when the
file looks simple.
This skill is for reading files, one at a time, inside your normal working loop. It is not a batch pipeline — see Batch processing, below, for why.
When NOT to reach for Tika: if your host can already read the file
natively (many agent environments read PDFs and images directly) and you
only need its visible text, use that — it's one step, not three. Tika earns
its place for everything else: .docx/.xlsx/.pptx, email (.eml,
.msg) and its attachments, archives, embedded content inside anything,
metadata (authors, dates, edit history), OCR, and the long tail of ~1000
formats nothing else opens.
Requirements: Tika 4.x needs Java 17+ (java -version to check).
No Java 17? In order of least pain:
-
Docker installed? Use the Docker route — zero local Java (see the
file-to-markdown-dockercompanion skill, ordocker run apache/tika:latest-full). -
No Docker either? Offer to install a user-local Java — ask the user first; never install software silently. The least invasive option is a Temurin JRE unpacked into a directory the user owns: ~45 MB, no admin rights, no PATH changes, uninstall = delete the directory.
mkdir -p ~/tika-jre && cd ~/tika-jre curl -L "https://api.adoptium.net/v3/binary/latest/21/ga/linux/x64/jre/hotspot/normal/eclipse" | tar xz ~/tika-jre/*/bin/java -jar tika-app.jar --versionSwap
linux/x64in the URL formac|windowsandaarch64as needed (Windows: fetch the.zipvariant and unzip). If the user prefers a managed install, the system package works too (temurin-21-jrevia apt,brew install --cask temurin@21,winget install EclipseAdoptium.Temurin.21.JRE) — that needs admin rights and touches system state, so it's their call, not the default. This skill describes Tika 4.x; on a 3.x install the defaults differ (3.x outputs XHTML, not Markdown, and some flags changed) — checkjava -jar tika-app.jar --versionorcurl localhost:9998/versionif behavior doesn't match what's described here.
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.
- 5d ago Changed · +2 lines 4d936077a1e5
- 17d ago Changed 69fab8b20d98
- 1mo ago First seen · 320 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A 5928ea1c123c
file-to-markdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository apache/tika (4,104 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 4,065 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.
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