craft-studio-marketplace 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
Supported Formats
| Format | Description | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Portable Document Format | Full text extraction — Hinweis: Für PDFs mit Tabellen oder komplexem Layout ist opendataloader-pdf deutlich genauer (0.90 vs. 0.29 Benchmark-Score). Bei einfachen Text-PDFs ist markitdown ausreichend. |
|
| DOCX | Microsoft Word | Tables, formatting preserved |
| PPTX | PowerPoint | Slides with notes |
| XLSX | Excel spreadsheets | Tables and data |
| Images | JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP | EXIF metadata + OCR |
| Audio | WAV, MP3 | Metadata + transcription |
| HTML | Web pages | Clean conversion |
| CSV | Comma-separated values | Table format |
| JSON | JSON data | Structured representation |
| XML | XML documents | Structured format |
| ZIP | Archive files | Iterates contents |
| EPUB | E-books | Full text extraction |
| YouTube | Video URLs | Fetch transcriptions |
Installation
# Install with all features
pip install 'markitdown[all]'
# Or install specific formats
pip install 'markitdown[pdf, docx, pptx]'
Command-Line Usage
# Basic conversion
markitdown document.pdf > output.md
# Specify output file
markitdown document.pdf -o output.md
# Pipe content
cat document.pdf | markitdown > output.md
Python API
from markitdown import MarkItDown
# Basic usage
md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("document.pdf")
print(result.text_content)
# Convert from stream
with open("document.pdf", "rb") as f:
result = md.convert_stream(f, file_extension=".pdf")
print(result.text_content)
AI-Enhanced Image Descriptions
Use LLMs via OpenRouter to generate detailed image descriptions:
from markitdown import MarkItDown
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key="your-openrouter-api-key",
base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1"
)
md = MarkItDown(
llm_client=client,
llm_model="anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5",
llm_prompt="Describe this image in detail"
)
result = md.convert("presentation.pptx")
print(result.text_content)
Common Use Cases
Convert Scientific Papers
from markitdown import MarkItDown
md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("research_paper.pdf")
with open("paper.md", "w") as f:
f.write(result.text_content)
Extract Data from Excel
from markitdown import MarkItDown
md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("data.xlsx")
print(result.text_content) # Markdown table format
YouTube Transcription
from markitdown import MarkItDown
md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID")
print(result.text_content)
Troubleshooting
Missing dependencies:
pip install 'markitdown[pdf]' # For PDF support
OCR not working:
# macOS
brew install tesseract
# Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
Resources
- GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
- PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/markitdown/
- OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai (for AI-enhanced conversions)