markitdownPython tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.

How to Contribute?

You can help by looking at issues or helping review PRs. Any issue or PR is welcome, but we have also marked some as 'open for contribution' and 'open for reviewing' to help facilitate community contributions. These are of course just suggestions and you are welcome to contribute in any way you like. | | All | Especially Needs Help from Community | | ---------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | Issues | All Issues | | | Issues open for contribution | | PRs | All PRs | | | PRs open for reviewing |

Asked by Nils Johansson · Nov 29, 2025

How can I use MarkItDown?

MarkItDown can be easily used with command-line invocation or pip.

Asked by Mohammed Al-Amin · Oct 3, 2025

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 cuendpoint 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 cuanalyzerid | | Audio and video | Basic audio, no video | Not supported | Audio and video analyzers | | Cost | Local compute only | Billable Azure API calls | Billable Azure API cal

Asked by Daniel Schmidt · Sep 22, 2025

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.

Asked by Oksana Melnyk · Sep 17, 2025

What are the system requirements for MarkItDown?

MarkItDown requires Python 3.10 or higher and is recommended to be used in a virtual environment.

Asked by Hasan Demir · Sep 12, 2025