MarkItDown Read

A file-reading skill that converts PDFs, Office documents, images, audio, web pages, ebooks, archives, and structured data into Markdown. Markdown is plain text formatted for easy reading and analysis.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to read and analyze files such as PDF reports, Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, images, audio recordings, HTML pages, CSV files, JSON, XML, EPUBs, and ZIP archives.
Why use it?
It removes the need to inspect many non-text file formats with separate tools. It also makes their contents easier to summarize or extract.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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/musingfox/cc-plugins/markitdown-read
Any agent
npx skills add musingfox/cc-plugins --skill markitdown-read
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/musingfox/cc-plugins

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 60 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 599 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 $0.00060 $0.00599
Opus 5 $0.00030 $0.00300
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00120
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00060

Measured yesterday against content hash ecc81136d70a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

MarkItDown Read 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 yesterday.

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.

markitdown/skills/markitdown-read/SKILL.md · 65 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 65 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

MarkItDown Read

Convert non-plain-text files to Markdown for reading and analysis using Microsoft's markitdown CLI.

Supported Formats

Category Extensions
Documents .pdf, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .xls
Web .html, .htm
Images .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tiff, .webp
Audio .mp3, .wav, .m4a, .ogg, .flac
Data .csv, .json, .xml
Other .epub, .zip

Workflow

Step 1: Check Installation

Before converting, verify markitdown is available:

command -v markitdown

If not installed, inform the user and offer installation options:

  • Recommended: uv tool install 'markitdown[all]' (isolated install, no virtual env pollution)
  • Alternative: pip install 'markitdown[all]'

Ask the user which method they prefer before installing. Do NOT install without confirmation.

Step 2: Convert and Read

Run markitdown on the target file and capture stdout:

markitdown <file-path>

The output is Markdown text printed to stdout. Read the output directly — do not save to a file unless the user explicitly asks.

Step 3: Present Content

After conversion, work with the Markdown output as if the file had been read natively:

  • Answer questions about the content
  • Summarize, extract, or analyze as requested
  • Reference specific sections, tables, or data points

Important Notes

  • For large files, the output may be extensive. Summarize first, then dive into specifics if asked.
  • Image conversion requires OCR capabilities — results depend on image quality and content.
  • Audio conversion requires speech recognition — results may vary by audio quality.
  • If markitdown fails on a specific file, report the error and suggest alternative approaches.
  • When the user asks to "read" or "open" a supported file type, prefer this skill over the Read tool for binary formats (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images, audio, EPUB, ZIP). For plain-text formats (HTML, CSV, JSON, XML), use this skill only when the user specifically wants Markdown conversion or when the Read tool output is insufficient.

Read the full file on GitHub · 65 lines

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. yesterday First seen · 65 lines · 60 tokens per session scan A ecc81136d70a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

MarkItDown Read is a skill published in the GitHub repository musingfox/cc-plugins (2 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 599 once invoked, about $0.0003 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.

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