markitdown

MarkItDown

Overview

MarkItDown is a Python utility that converts various file formats into Markdown format, optimized for use with large language models and text analysis pipelines. It preserves document structure (headings, lists, tables, hyperlinks) while producing clean, token-efficient Markdown output.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when users request:

• Converting documents to Markdown format
• Extracting text from PDF, Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files
• Performing OCR on images to extract text
• Transcribing audio files to text
• Extracting YouTube video transcripts
• Processing HTML, EPUB, or web content to Markdown
• Converting structured data (CSV, JSON, XML) to readable Markdown
• Batch converting multiple files or ZIP archives
• Preparing documents for LLM analysis or RAG systems

Core Capabilities

1. Document Conversion

Convert Office documents and PDFs to Markdown while preserving structure.

Supported formats:

• PDF files (with optional Azure Document Intelligence integration)
• Word documents (DOCX)
• PowerPoint presentations (PPTX)
• Excel spreadsheets (XLSX, XLS)

Basic usage:

from markitdown import MarkItDown

md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("document.pdf")
print(result.text_content)

Command-line:

markitdown document.pdf -o output.md

See references/document_conversion.md for detailed documentation on document-specific features.

2. Media Processing

Extract text from images using OCR and transcribe audio files to text.

Supported formats:

• Images (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc.) with EXIF metadata extraction
• Audio files with speech transcription (requires speech_recognition)

Image with OCR:

from markitdown import MarkItDown

md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("image.jpg")
print(result.text_content)  # Includes EXIF metadata and OCR text

Audio transcription:

result = md.convert("audio.wav")
print(result.text_content)  # Transcribed speech