MarkItDown

Purpose

Convert a wide variety of file formats into Markdown text using Microsoft's markitdown CLI. Useful for extracting text from documents for LLM analysis, summarization, or ingestion into knowledge bases.

Supported Formats

Category	Formats
Documents	PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, XLS
Web & Data	HTML, CSV, JSON, XML
Media	Images (EXIF + OCR), Audio (metadata + transcription)
eBooks	EPub
Archives	ZIP (iterates over contents)
Other	YouTube URLs, Outlook messages

Basic Usage

# Convert a file (output to stdout)
markitdown path/to/file.pdf

# Save output to a file
markitdown path/to/file.pdf -o output.md

# Pipe from stdin
cat path/to/file.pdf | markitdown

Options

Flag	Description
-o <file>	Write output to a file instead of stdout
-d	Use Azure Document Intelligence for conversion
-e "<endpoint>"	Azure Document Intelligence endpoint URL
--use-plugins	Enable third-party plugins
--list-plugins	Show installed plugins

Workflow

Single File Conversion

# Convert and capture the result
result=$(markitdown document.pdf)

# Convert and save
markitdown document.pdf -o document.md

Batch Conversion

# Convert all PDFs in a directory
for f in *.pdf; do
  markitdown "$f" -o "${f%.pdf}.md"
done

Pipe into Other Tools

# Convert and count words
markitdown document.pdf | wc -w

# Convert and search for a term
markitdown document.pdf | grep -i "search term"

Agent Usage Notes

• Output goes to stdout by default. Capture it in a variable or redirect to a file.
• For large files, prefer saving to a file with -o rather than capturing stdout.
• Image conversion extracts EXIF metadata and OCR text. For richer image descriptions, use the Python API with an LLM client instead.
• ZIP files are automatically extracted and each contained file is converted.
• If conversion fails for a format, check that the corresponding optional dependency is installed (e.g., markitdown[pdf] for PDF support).