MarkItDown

Overview

MarkItDown is Microsoft's lightweight Python utility for turning common documents into structure-preserving Markdown. Its output is designed primarily for indexing, text analysis, search, and LLM ingestion, not high-fidelity visual reproduction.

This skill targets MarkItDown 0.1.6, released May 26, 2026. New code should use result.markdown; result.text_content remains only as a soft-deprecated compatibility alias.

Choose the Right Path

Need	Recommended path
Trusted local PDF, Office, HTML, CSV, EPUB, or ZIP	Built-in converter with convert_local()
Uploaded bytes or an already-open file	convert_stream() with StreamInfo hints
Remote HTTP(S) input	Validate and fetch it yourself, then call convert_response()
Scanned PDF or text inside embedded images	Official markitdown-ocr vision plugin, Azure Document Intelligence, or Azure Content Understanding
Video, structured fields, or custom multimodal extraction	Azure Content Understanding
Local agent integration	Official markitdown-mcp server over STDIO or localhost
Bounding boxes, page coordinates, or screenshots	Use a layout-aware parser such as LiteParse instead
PDF merge/split/forms/watermarks	Use the pdf skill instead

Installation

Create an isolated environment:

uv venv --python 3.12 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Install every built-in feature:

uv pip install "markitdown[all]==0.1.6"

Or install only the converters required by the task:

uv pip install "markitdown[pdf,docx,pptx,xlsx]==0.1.6"

Available extras in 0.1.6 are:

• pptx, docx, xlsx, xls, pdf, and outlook
• audio-transcription and youtube-transcription
• az-doc-intel and az-content-understanding
• all

Verify the installation:

markitdown --version
python scripts/inspect_installation.py