MarkItDown Skill

OpenClaw agent skill for converting documents to Markdown. Documentation and utilities for Microsoft's MarkItDown library. Supports PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, images (OCR), audio (transcription), HTML, YouTube.

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

bash

# 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:

bash

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

Or install specific formats only:

bash

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

Common Patterns

Fetch Documentation

bash

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

Convert PDF

bash

markitdown document.pdf -o document.md

Batch Convert

bash

# 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

python

from markitdown import MarkItDown

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

Troubleshooting

"markitdown not found"

bash

pip install 'markitdown[all]'

OCR Not Working

bash

# 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