MarkItDown
Python command-line tool that converts PDFs, Office files and other documents into Markdown.
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About MarkItDown
MarkItDown converts files into Markdown that keeps headings, lists, tables and links, mainly as input for LLMs and text analysis. It reads PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, EPUB and ZIP archives, and can extract image metadata with OCR, transcribe audio and pull YouTube URLs.
It can be used from the command line or from Python code. The output is meant for machines rather than faithful, human-ready document conversion.
Strengths
- Converts many formats, including Office files and PDF
- Preserves document structure such as tables and headings
- Usable from the command line or Python
Limitations
- Output is aimed at LLMs, not high-fidelity conversion
- Accesses whatever the running process can reach, so inputs need care
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree and open source under the MIT licence.
- License
- MIT
- Developer
- Microsoft
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux, Command line
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Best suited for
- Preparing documents as Markdown for LLMs and text pipelines
- Categories
- PDF tools, Developer tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Facts checked against the developer's own pages and store listings, 2 sources on file.
Alternatives to MarkItDown
Compare allSoftware that can replace MarkItDown for an important use case, and what changes if you switch.
Marker
An open-source tool that converts PDFs and other documents to Markdown, JSON and HTML.
Marker converts PDFs and other documents to Markdown, JSON and HTML with table and equation handling, but needs a Python environment and benefits from a GPU.
MinerU
A document parser that converts PDFs, Office files and scans into Markdown and JSON.
MinerU parses PDFs, Office files and scans into Markdown and JSON with OCR, but setup and model downloads suit technical users and its licence is non-standard.
olmOCR
Open-source toolkit that uses a vision language model to turn PDFs and scans into Markdown.
olmOCR uses a vision language model to turn PDFs and scans into Markdown, handling handwriting and complex layouts, but it requires a capable GPU on Linux.
PaddleOCR
OCR toolkit that turns PDFs and images into structured data.
PaddleOCR parses PDFs and images into JSON and Markdown with layout and table recognition, but depends on the large PaddlePaddle framework and lacks Office input.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
Poppler
PDF rendering library with pdftotext, pdftoppm and pdfinfo tools.
pdf2htmlEX
A command-line converter that turns PDF files into HTML while keeping text and layout.
Tesseract OCR
The open-source OCR engine behind most free text recognition tools.
Xpdf
A PDF viewer plus command-line tools for extracting text and images and converting PDFs to HTML.
ChatPDF
An AI tool that summarizes PDFs and answers questions about them, with citations to the source.
