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:

• 📄 Fetching documentation (README, API docs)
• 🌐 Converting web pages to markdown
• 📝 Document analysis (PDFs, Word, PowerPoint)
• 🎬 YouTube transcripts
• 🖼️ Image text extraction (OCR)
• 🎤 Audio transcription

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

• USAGE-GUIDE.md - Detailed examples
• reference.md - Full API reference
• Microsoft MarkItDown - Upstream library