File To Markdown
Turn almost any file into Markdown plus metadata, PDF, Office, HTML, email, archives...
Install
npx skills add apache/tika --skill file-to-markdown -g -a claude-code -y- Repository
- apache/tika4.1k
- Category
- Documents
- Updated
- 3d ago
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Context cost
- Mediumabout 3,000 tokens
- Runs scripts
- No, instructions only
What it does
Turn almost any file into Markdown plus metadata, PDF, Office, HTML, email, archives, images, audio/video, 1000+ formats, powered by Apache Tika, either via the tika-app CLI (zero setup, one file) or a running tika-server (curl, warm process, many calls). Leads with rmeta (structured, embedded-item-aware output) as the default operation rather than flat concatenated text, since you can't tell whether a file has embedded content from its extension. Covers metadata-only triage, type and language detection, OCR, and output-size discipline for agent context. Use whenever a task involves reading the content of a file whose format you don't want to hand-parse.
Local override: $TIKA_SKILLS_LOCAL/file-to-markdown/LOCAL.md (default ~/.tika-skills),
read after this file, wins on conflict.
Using Apache Tika from an agent
Apache Tika turns almost any document into text you can read, and reports
per-document content as Markdown by default (4.x), the format you
actually want, not raw XML or a wall of HTML tags. See below for why to
reach for the structured rmeta view rather than a flat blob, even when the
file looks simple.
This skill is for reading files, one at a time, inside your normal working loop. It is not a batch pipeline, see Batch processing, below, for why.
When NOT to reach for Tika: if your host can already read the file
natively (many agent environments read PDFs and images directly) and you
only need its visible text, use that, it's one step, not three. Tika earns
its place for everything else: .docx/.xlsx/.pptx, email (.eml,
.msg) and its attachments, archives, embedded content inside anything,
metadata (authors, dates, edit history), OCR, and the long tail of ~1000
formats nothing else opens.
Requirements: Tika 4.x needs Java 17+ (java -version to check).
No Java 17? In order of least pain:
