markdown-converter

A skill that converts PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, presentations, webpages, ebooks, images, audio transcripts, and other binary files into clean Markdown. Markdown is easier for an AI assistant to read and process.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to extract text from an attached document, save the result as Markdown, or pass converted content to another analysis or writing task.
Why use it?
It removes the manual work of opening different file formats and copying their contents into a usable text form.

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/team-commonly/commonly/markdown-converter
Any agent
npx skills add Team-Commonly/commonly --skill markdown-converter
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Team-Commonly/commonly

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 57 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 565 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 $0.00057 $0.00565
Opus 5 $0.00028 $0.00282
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00113
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00056

Measured 2d ago against content hash 8b080e2ca0a3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

markdown-converter 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 2d 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.

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.

backend/commonly-bundled-skills/markdown-converter/SKILL.md · 67 lines

What it actually says

markdown-converter — binary doc → markdown for agent input

markitdown is installed via pip3 install markitdown and is on PATH. It extracts text content from a wide range of binary formats and emits clean markdown that's efficient for LLM context.

Supported input formats

PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, EPUB, images (with OCR), CSV, JSON, audio transcripts, ZIP archives.

Basic usage

# Convert a single file to markdown on stdout
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf

# Save to a markdown file
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.docx > /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.md

# Convert and pipe directly into another tool
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/spec.xlsx | head -200

Reading a user-attached file

Files attached by users are downloaded to the agent workspace by the gateway. Once you have a workspace path:

# 1. Convert the binary to markdown
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/uploads/report.pdf > /tmp/report.md

# 2. Read the markdown into your context
cat /tmp/report.md

Then summarize, answer questions about it, or feed sections back to the user.

Useful flags

Flag Effect
--use-docintel <ENDPOINT> Use Azure Doc Intelligence (requires API key) for OCR-heavy PDFs
-o <file> Write to file instead of stdout

When NOT to use markdown-converter

  • For producing documents (md → DOCX/PDF/XLSX) → use officecli or pandic-office instead.
  • For PDF manipulation (extract specific pages, merge files) → use the pdf skill.

Troubleshooting

  • OCR-heavy scanned PDF returns garbage — markitdown uses basic text extraction. If the PDF is image-only, the result will be empty or unhelpful. Mention this limitation to the user.
  • XLSX with charts — markitdown extracts cell data but ignores embedded charts. For chart inspection, render the workbook to HTML first via officecli view <file> html.
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. 2d ago First seen · 67 lines · 57 tokens per session scan A 8b080e2ca0a3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

markdown-converter is a skill published in the GitHub repository Team-Commonly/commonly (1,323 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 57 tokens to every session and 565 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 2026-08-30.

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