MarkItDown

[!IMPORTANT] MarkItDown performs I/O with the privileges of the current process. Like open() or requests.get(), it will access resources that the process itself can access. Sanitize your inputs in untrusted environments, and call the narrowest convert_* function needed for your use case (e.g., convert_stream(), or convert_local()). See the Security Considerations section of the documentation for more information.

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:

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

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

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:

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:

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
• [az-content-understanding] Installs dependencies for Azure Content Understanding
• [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.

markitdown-ocr Plugin

The markitdown-ocr plugin adds OCR support to PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX converters, extracting text from embedded images using LLM Vision — the same llm_client / llm_model pattern that MarkItDown already uses for image descriptions. No new ML libraries or binary dependencies required.

Installation:

pip install markitdown-ocr
pip install openai  # or any OpenAI-compatible client

Usage:

Pass the same llm_client and llm_model you would use for image descriptions:

from markitdown import MarkItDown
from openai import OpenAI

md = MarkItDown(
    enable_plugins=True,
    llm_client=OpenAI(),
    llm_model="gpt-4o",
)
result = md.convert("document_with_images.pdf")
print(result.text_content)

If no llm_client is provided the plugin still loads, but OCR is silently skipped and the standard built-in converter is used instead.

See packages/markitdown-ocr/README.md for detailed documentation.

Azure Content Understanding

Azure Content Understanding provides higher-quality conversion with structured field extraction (YAML front matter), multi-modal support (documents, images, audio, video), and configurable analyzers.

Install: pip install 'markitdown[az-content-understanding]'

When to use Content Understanding

Content Understanding is ideal when you need capabilities beyond what built-in or Document Intelligence converters provide:

• Audio and video files — CU is the only option for video, and the higher-quality cloud option for audio. Built-in converters have no video support and only basic audio transcription.
• Structured field extraction — Prebuilt or custom-built analyzers extract domain-specific fields (invoice amounts, receipt dates, contract clauses) serialized as YAML front matter. Neither built-in nor Doc Intel integration exposes fields.
• Higher-quality document extraction — Cloud-based layout analysis and OCR for scanned PDFs, complex tables, and multi-page documents.
• Single API for all modalities — One cu_endpoint handles documents, images, audio, and video with automatic analyzer routing.

Capability	Built-in converters	Azure Document Intelligence	Azure Content Understanding
Document conversion	Offline, format-specific extraction	Cloud layout extraction	Cloud multimodal extraction
Structured fields	Not available	Not exposed by this integration	YAML front matter from analyzer fields
Custom analyzers	Not available	Not configurable in this integration	Supported with cu_analyzer_id
Audio and video	Basic audio, no video	Not supported	Audio and video analyzers
Cost	Local compute