Getting it into your agent
It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/LeonChaoX/qinyan-academic-skillsnpx agentmods add skills/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdownWrote 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/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdown)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdown/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/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/leonchaox/qinyan-academic-skills/markitdown.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00053 | $0.03034 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00026 | $0.01517 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00011 | $0.00607 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00303 |
Grade B, and why
markitdown scanned grade B 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 9d 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.
Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation
A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr This is a copy
98% identical to markitdown — 19 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 489 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
MarkItDown - File to Markdown Conversion
Overview
MarkItDown is a Python tool developed by Microsoft for converting various file formats to Markdown. It's particularly useful for converting documents into LLM-friendly text format, as Markdown is token-efficient and well-understood by modern language models.
Key Benefits:
- Convert documents to clean, structured Markdown
- Token-efficient format for LLM processing
- Supports 15+ file formats
- Optional AI-enhanced image descriptions
- OCR for images and scanned documents
- Speech transcription for audio files
Visual Enhancement with Scientific Schematics
When creating documents with this skill, always consider adding scientific diagrams and schematics to enhance visual communication.
If your document does not already contain schematics or diagrams:
- Use the scientific-schematics skill to generate AI-powered publication-quality diagrams
- Simply describe your desired diagram in natural language
- Nano Banana Pro will automatically generate, review, and refine the schematic
For new documents: Scientific schematics should be generated by default to visually represent key concepts, workflows, architectures, or relationships described in the text.
How to generate schematics:
python scripts/generate_schematic.py "your diagram description" -o figures/output.png
The AI will automatically:
- Create publication-quality images with proper formatting
- Review and refine through multiple iterations
- Ensure accessibility (colorblind-friendly, high contrast)
- Save outputs in the figures/ directory
When to add schematics:
- Document conversion workflow diagrams
- File format architecture illustrations
- OCR processing pipeline diagrams
- Integration workflow visualizations
- System architecture diagrams
- Data flow diagrams
- Any complex concept that benefits from visualization
For detailed guidance on creating schematics, refer to the scientific-schematics skill documentation.
What ships with it
6 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.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 489 lines · 53 tokens per session scan B d3e7b8babf6e
markitdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository LeonChaoX/qinyan-academic-skills (883 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 3,034 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). It is 98% identical to markitdown, differing in 19 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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ocr-and-documents
Extract text from PDFs and scanned documents. Use webextract for remote URLs, pymupdf for local text-based PDFs, marker-pdf for OCR/scanned docs. For DOCX use python-docx, for PPTX see the powerpoint skill.