microsoft / MarkItDown

MarkItDown is a lightweight Microsoft utility that converts a wide range of document formats — PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, images, and more — into clean Markdown ready for LLM ingestion.

🎯 Use Cases

• RAG Document Ingestion: Normalize many input formats into Markdown.
• LLM Preprocessing: Feed clean text to chat or extraction prompts.
• CLI / Scripting: One-shot conversion in pipelines.

✨ Features

• Many input formats (PDF, Office, HTML, images, audio)
• Plugin architecture for extending conversions
• CLI and Python API
• Designed specifically for LLM-friendly Markdown output

👍 Pros

• Wide format coverage from a single tool
• Microsoft-maintained with active development
• Easy to drop into existing pipelines

👎 Cons & Limitations

• PDF parsing quality varies by document
• Complex layouts may need a heavier parser (e.g. LlamaParse)