Info

MarkItDown

4/9/2025

MarkItDown

MarkItDown is a lightweight Python utility for converting various files to Markdown for use with LLMs and related text analysis pipelines. To this end, it is most comparable to textract, but with a focus on preserving important document structure and content as Markdown (including: headings, lists, tables, links, etc.) While the output is often reasonably presentable and human-friendly, it is meant to be consumed by text analysis tools — and may not be the best option for high-fidelity document conversions for human consumption.

MarkItDown currently supports the conversion from:

  • PDF
  • PowerPoint
  • Word
  • Excel
  • Images (EXIF metadata and OCR)
  • Audio (EXIF metadata and speech transcription)
  • HTML
  • Text-based formats (CSV, JSON, XML)
  • ZIP files (iterates over contents)
  • Youtube URLs
  • EPubs
  • … and more!

Why Markdown?

Markdown is extremely close to plain text, with minimal markup or formatting, but still provides a way to represent important document structure. Mainstream LLMs, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, natively “speak” Markdown, and often incorporate Markdown into their responses unprompted. This suggests that they have been trained on vast amounts of Markdown-formatted text, and understand it well. As a side benefit, Markdown conventions are also highly token-efficient.

Prerequisites

MarkItDown requires Python 3.10 or higher. It is recommended to use a virtual environment to avoid dependency conflicts.

With the standard Python installation, you can create and activate a virtual environment using the following commands:

Terminal window
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

If using uv, you can create a virtual environment with:

Terminal window
uv venv --python=3.12 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
# NOTE: Be sure to use 'uv pip install' rather than just 'pip install' to install packages in this virtual environment

If you are using Anaconda, you can create a virtual environment with:

Terminal window
conda create -n markitdown python=3.12
conda activate markitdown

Installation

To install MarkItDown, use pip: pip install 'markitdown[all]'. Alternatively, you can install it from the source:

Terminal window
git clone git@github.com:microsoft/markitdown.git
cd markitdown
pip install -e 'packages/markitdown[all]'

Usage

Command-Line

markitdown path-to-file.pdf > document.md

Or use -o to specify the output file:

markitdown path-to-file.pdf -o document.md

You can also pipe content:

cat path-to-file.pdf | markitdown

Optional Dependencies

MarkItDown has optional dependencies for activating various file formats. Earlier in this document, we installed all optional dependencies with the [all] option. However, you can also install them individually for more control. For example:

pip install 'markitdown[pdf, docx, pptx]'

will install only the dependencies for PDF, DOCX, and PPTX files.

At the moment, the following optional dependencies are available:

  • [all] Installs all optional dependencies
  • [pptx] Installs dependencies for PowerPoint files
  • [docx] Installs dependencies for Word files
  • [xlsx] Installs dependencies for Excel files
  • [xls] Installs dependencies for older Excel files
  • [pdf] Installs dependencies for PDF files
  • [outlook] Installs dependencies for Outlook messages
  • [az-doc-intel] Installs dependencies for Azure Document Intelligence
  • [audio-transcription] Installs dependencies for audio transcription of wav and mp3 files
  • [youtube-transcription] Installs dependencies for fetching YouTube video transcription

Plugins

MarkItDown also supports 3rd-party plugins. Plugins are disabled by default. To list installed plugins:

markitdown --list-plugins

To enable plugins use:

markitdown --use-plugins path-to-file.pdf

To find available plugins, search GitHub for the hashtag #markitdown-plugin. To develop a plugin, see packages/markitdown-sample-plugin.

Azure Document Intelligence

To use Microsoft Document Intelligence for conversion:

markitdown path-to-file.pdf -o document.md -d -e "<document_intelligence_endpoint>"

More information about how to set up an Azure Document Intelligence Resource can be found here

Python API

Basic usage in Python:

from markitdown import MarkItDown


md = MarkItDown(enable_plugins=False) # Set to True to enable plugins
result = md.convert("test.xlsx")
print(result.text_content)

Document Intelligence conversion in Python:

from markitdown import MarkItDown


md = MarkItDown(docintel_endpoint="<document_intelligence_endpoint>")
result = md.convert("test.pdf")
print(result.text_content)

To use Large Language Models for image descriptions, provide llm_client and llm_model:

from markitdown import MarkItDown
from openai import OpenAI


client = OpenAI()
md = MarkItDown(llm_client=client, llm_model="gpt-4o")
result = md.convert("example.jpg")
print(result.text_content)

Docker

Terminal window
docker build -t markitdown:latest .
docker run --rm -i markitdown:latest < ~/your-file.pdf > output.md

Tip

MarkItDown now offers an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for integration with LLM applications like Claude Desktop. See markitdown-mcp for more information.

Important

Breaking changes between 0.0.1 to 0.1.0:

  • Dependencies are now organized into optional feature-groups (further details below). Use pip install 'markitdown[all]' to have backward-compatible behavior.
  • convert_stream() now requires a binary file-like object (e.g., a file opened in binary mode, or an io.BytesIO object). This is a breaking change from the previous version, where it previously also accepted text file-like objects, like io.StringIO.
  • The DocumentConverter class interface has changed to read from file-like streams rather than file paths. No temporary files are created anymore. If you are the maintainer of a plugin, or custom DocumentConverter, you likely need to update your code. Otherwise, if only using the MarkItDown class or CLI (as in these examples), you should not need to change anything.
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