markitdown

markitdown is a skill for Claude Code from coroboros/agent-skills. It costs 130 tokens per session (1,693 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A tool workflow for converting files such as PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, images, audio, and YouTube videos into Markdown, a plain-text format commonly used in code projects.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to extract document text, read tables, OCR images, transcribe audio, obtain YouTube transcripts, or convert structured files into Markdown.
Why use it?
It removes the need to copy text manually from different file types. It can also use OCR to read images and transcription to turn audio or video speech into text.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions Claude Code.

Part of the media-skills plugin — 5 skills 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/coroboros/agent-skills/markitdown
Any agent
npx skills add coroboros/agent-skills --skill markitdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/coroboros/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install media-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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/coroboros/agent-skills/markitdown.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/coroboros/agent-skills/markitdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/coroboros/agent-skills/markitdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/coroboros/agent-skills/markitdown.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 130 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,693 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 $0.00130 $0.01693
Opus 5 $0.00065 $0.00847
Sonnet 5 $0.00026 $0.00339
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00169

Measured 5d ago against content hash 4c4847459142, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-05, 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 5d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/markitdown.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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 · 101 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 101 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MarkItDown

Convert a document, image, audio file, or YouTube URL to Markdown using Microsoft's markitdown CLI. The skill validates the input, composes the right flags, optionally saves the result under ~/.agents/output/<project>/markitdown/<slug>/, and reports a one-line summary with the fully-expanded absolute path (no tilde, no magic).

The deterministic work — install check, validation, slug derivation, save path, command composition — happens in scripts/markitdown.sh. The skill parses $ARGUMENTS, hands them to the script, and turns the script's RESULT: lines into a human report.

Install

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

For a smaller install, pick only what you need:

Group Adds
[pdf] PDF parsing
[docx] Word documents
[pptx] PowerPoint
[xlsx] [xls] Excel
[outlook] Outlook .msg
[audio-transcription] MP3/WAV via local Whisper
[youtube-transcription] YouTube transcripts
[az-doc-intel] Azure Document Intelligence backend

For Azure Document Intelligence, also export MARKITDOWN_DOCINTEL_ENDPOINT=https://<resource>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/ before invoking with -d.

Parameters

Flag Default Effect
-s off Save Markdown to ~/.agents/output/<project>/markitdown/<slug>/<stem>.md
-S off Force no-save (override an ambient save mode)
-d off Use Azure Document Intelligence (needs MARKITDOWN_DOCINTEL_ENDPOINT)
-p off Enable installed third-party markitdown plugins
-k off Keep data URIs (base64 images) inline in the output
-l List installed plugins and exit

Output saved under ~/.agents/output/{project}/markitdown/{slug}/, where {project} is the kebab-cased basename of the git toplevel (else cwd) and {slug} is a kebab of the input basename (≤5 words). Pipeline-friendly — typical downstream: /forge -s -f <path> decomposes the extracted content into workstreams; /apex -f <path> implements from it; any skill accepting -f can consume.

Read the full file on GitHub · 101 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file 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. 5d ago First seen · 101 lines · 130 tokens per session scan A 4c4847459142

Subscribe to this mod's changes

markitdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository coroboros/agent-skills (4 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 130 tokens to every session and 1,693 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-31.