markitdown

markitdown is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from synthetic-sciences/openscience. It costs 53 tokens per session (3,045 once invoked), scanned B, original, Apache-2.0.

A tool for converting PDFs, office files, images, audio, web pages, and structured data into Markdown, a simple text format that is easy for people and language models to read.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps extract text from documents, convert spreadsheets and presentations, read scanned files, transcribe audio, and prepare files for language-model processing.
Why use it?
It turns many different file types into one consistent text format and can handle scanned images with OCR and audio with transcription.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

About the project

synthetic-sciences/openscience is an AI workbench that carries out scientific research by reading papers, forming hypotheses, writing and running code, conducting experiments, analyzing results, and preparing reports. Researchers use it for work in machine learning, biology, physics, and chemistry with remote or local models. Catalogue add-ons extend its scientific workflows through skills and instructions.

synthetic-sciences/openscience · 3,473 stars · on GitHub

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/synthetic-sciences/openscience/markitdown
Any agent
npx skills add synthetic-sciences/openscience --skill markitdown
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/synthetic-sciences/openscience

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

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/synthetic-sciences/openscience/markitdown.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/markitdown)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/markitdown"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/synthetic-sciences/openscience/markitdown.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,045 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan B 1 finding. 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 $0.00053 $0.03045
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01522
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00609
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00304

Measured yesterday against content hash 79662d11bc22, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 yesterday.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/batch_convert.py, scripts/convert_literature.py, scripts/convert_with_ai.py), 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.

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
Origin

Copies of this mod

8 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

backend/cli/skills/data-engineering/markitdown/SKILL.md · 488 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 488 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.

Read the full file on GitHub · 488 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 · 488 lines · 53 tokens per session scan B 79662d11bc22

Subscribe to this mod's changes

markitdown is a skill published in the GitHub repository synthetic-sciences/openscience (3,473 stars, last pushed today), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 3,045 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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