MarkItDown Skill

MarkItDown Skill

Documentation and utilities for converting documents to Markdown using Microsoft's MarkItDown library.

> Note: This skill provides documentation and a batch script. The actual conversion is done by the markitdown CLI/library installed via pip.

When to Use

Use markitdown for:

Quick Start

# Convert file to markdown
markitdown document.pdf -o output.md
Convert URL
markitdown https://example.com/docs -o docs.md

Supported Formats

| Format | Features | |--------|----------| | PDF | Text extraction, structure | | Word (.docx) | Headings, lists, tables | | PowerPoint | Slides, text | | Excel | Tables, sheets | | Images | OCR + EXIF metadata | | Audio | Speech transcription | | HTML | Structure preservation | | YouTube | Video transcription |

Installation

The skill requires Microsoft's markitdown CLI:

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

Or install specific formats only:

pip install 'markitdown[pdf,docx,pptx]'

Common Patterns

Fetch Documentation

markitdown https://github.com/user/repo/blob/main/README.md -o readme.md

Convert PDF

markitdown document.pdf -o document.md

Batch Convert

# Using included script
python ~/.openclaw/skills/markitdown/scripts/batch_convert.py docs/*.pdf -o markdown/ -v
Or shell loop
for file in docs/*.pdf; do
  markitdown "$file" -o "${file%.pdf}.md"
done

Python API

from markitdown import MarkItDown
md = MarkItDown()
result = md.convert("document.pdf")
print(result.text_content)

Troubleshooting

"markitdown not found"

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

OCR Not Working

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
macOS
brew install tesseract

What This Skill Provides

| Component | Source | |-----------|--------| | markitdown CLI | Microsoft's pip package | | markitdown Python API | Microsoft's pip package | | scripts/batch_convert.py | This skill (utility) | | Documentation | This skill |

See Also

# Convert file to markdown
markitdown document.pdf -o output.md
Convert URL
markitdown https://example.com/docs -o docs.md

"markitdown not found"

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

OCR Not Working

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
macOS
brew install tesseract