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 pars… |