markitdown

Converts files to Markdown via uvx.

Usage

uvx --with 'markitdown[all]' markitdown <file> -o output.md

Reads from stdin too:

cat file.docx | uvx --with 'markitdown[all]' markitdown

Supported formats

PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, XLS, images (EXIF + OCR), audio (EXIF + transcription), HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, ZIP (iterates contents), YouTube URLs, EPubs.

When to use

• User wants to read content from a binary file (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images, audio, etc.)
• User provides a YouTube URL and wants a transcript
• User wants to extract text/tables from a file for analysis

When NOT to use

• PDF manipulation (merge, split, rotate, fill forms, create) — use pypdf/reportlab with uv run
• Web page scraping — use firecrawl
• Files Claude can read natively (plain text, code, Markdown)