Agent-Skills.md

Agent Skills: markitdown - Document to Markdown

Convert local documents to Markdown using Microsoft's markitdown CLI. Best for: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images (OCR), audio. Can fetch URLs but Jina is faster for web. Triggers on: convert to markdown, read PDF, parse document, extract text from, docx, xlsx, pptx, OCR image, local file.

UncategorizedID: 0xdarkmatter/claude-mods/markitdown

Repository

0xdarkmatter/claude-mods
0xDarkMatter
6

Install this agent skill to your local

pnpm dlx add-skill https://github.com/0xDarkMatter/claude-mods/tree/HEAD/skills/markitdown

Skill Files

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skills/markitdown/SKILL.md

Skill Metadata

Name
markitdown
Description
"Convert local documents to Markdown using Microsoft's markitdown CLI. Best for: PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images (OCR), audio. Can fetch URLs but Jina is faster for web. Triggers on: convert to markdown, read PDF, parse document, extract text from, docx, xlsx, pptx, OCR image, local file."

markitdown - Document to Markdown

Convert local documents to clean Markdown. One tool for PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, and more.

When to Use markitdown

| Use Case | Recommendation | |----------|----------------| | Local files (PDF, Word, Excel) | ✅ Use markitdown - unique capability | | Web pages | ❌ Use Jina (r.jina.ai/) - 5x faster | | Blocked/anti-bot sites | ❌ Use Firecrawl | | OCR on images | ✅ Use markitdown | | Audio transcription | ✅ Use markitdown |

Basic Usage

# Local files (primary use case)
markitdown document.pdf
markitdown report.docx
markitdown data.xlsx
markitdown slides.pptx
markitdown screenshot.png    # OCR

# URLs (works, but Jina is faster)
markitdown https://example.com

# Save output
markitdown document.pdf > document.md

Supported Formats

| Format | Extensions | Notes | |--------|------------|-------| | PDF | .pdf | Text extraction, tables | | Word | .docx | Formatting preserved | | Excel | .xlsx | Tables to markdown | | PowerPoint | .pptx | Slides as sections | | Images | .jpg, .png | OCR text extraction | | HTML | .html | Clean conversion | | Audio | .mp3, .wav | Speech-to-text | | Text | .txt, .csv, .json, .xml | Pass-through/structure | | URLs | https://... | Works but slower than Jina |

Benchmarked Performance (URLs)

| Tool | Avg Speed | Success Rate | |------|-----------|--------------| | Jina | 0.5s | 10/10 | | markitdown | 2.5s | 9/10 | | Firecrawl | 4.5s | 10/10 |

Verdict: For URLs, use Jina. For local files, markitdown is the only option.

Examples

# PDF to markdown (primary use case)
markitdown report.pdf > report.md

# Excel spreadsheet
markitdown financials.xlsx

# Image with text (OCR)
markitdown screenshot.png

# PowerPoint deck
markitdown presentation.pptx > slides.md

# Audio transcription
markitdown meeting.mp3 > transcript.md

Comparison with Alternatives

| Task | markitdown | Alternative | |------|------------|-------------| | PDF text | markitdown file.pdf | PyMuPDF, pdfplumber | | Word docs | markitdown file.docx | python-docx | | Excel | markitdown file.xlsx | pandas, openpyxl | | OCR | markitdown image.png | Tesseract | | Web pages | Use Jina instead | r.jina.ai/URL (5x faster) |

markitdown's advantage: One CLI for all local document formats. No code needed.