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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteMarkItDown converts files such as PDFs, DOCX documents and XLSX workbooks into Markdown through a small Python API or a command-line utility. For those formats, install the matching optional dependencies—or the all extra. One caution matters for important documents: a reported PDF edge case returned text before an unusually encoded inline image but silently omitted text after it. A successful conversion is not proof that every source detail made it through.
Install MarkItDown for the formats you need
The MarkItDown project describes the package as a utility for converting files to Markdown for use with language models and text-analysis pipelines. Its README specifies Python 3.10 through 3.14 and recommends using a virtual environment. A base installation may not include converters for every format: PDF, DOCX and XLSX support is provided through optional dependencies.
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To install support for those three formats, or broadly enable the project’s optional formats, use the relevant extra:
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install 'markitdown[pdf,docx,xlsx]'
# Or install the broader set of optional formats:
pip install 'markitdown[all]'The package metadata identifies pdfminer.six and pdfplumber for PDF conversion, Mammoth and lxml for DOCX, and pandas and openpyxl for XLSX. Choose targeted extras when you only need specific formats; the all extra is the broader setup.
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Convert a file with Python or the command line
Python API
Pass a file path to MarkItDown().convert(). The returned result exposes the Markdown as markdown:
from markitdown import MarkItDown
converter = MarkItDown()
result = converter.convert("report.pdf")
print(result.markdown)Change the path to a DOCX or XLSX file to convert those formats as well, provided their optional dependencies are installed.
Command-line utility
For a quick conversion from a shell, redirect the command’s output into a Markdown file:
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markitdown report.pdf > report.mdThis produces a Markdown text representation, not a faithful visual replica of the original. Layout, tables, images and embedded text may be represented differently or omitted depending on the source file and converter path.
What the reported silent PDF failure involves
An issue opened in the MarkItDown repository on May 9, 2026 describes a specific case in which PDF text after an inline image was missing from the extracted output, even though text before the image appeared. The report concerns an inline image in the PDF content stream, written as BI ... ID ... EI, using ASCII85 and Flate filters with a bare ~ terminator. The reporter said both the pdfplumber and pdfminer extraction paths returned the preceding text but did not surface the following text. The issue describes a synthetic reproduction and a real-world invoice, and suspects parser behavior as the cause. Read the issue report and reproduction details.
The reported environment was MarkItDown commit 4b65609 from May 7, 2026, pdfplumber 0.11.9, pdfminer.six 20251230, PyMuPDF 1.27.2.3, macOS 15.6 and Python 3.13. This is evidence of a reported edge case in that environment—not a measured failure rate, proof that PDFs generally lose text, or confirmation that the same defect remains in current releases. The issue’s status can change; consult the report and release history for the version you use.
Check important conversions against the source
MarkItDown’s conversion result can be nonempty and still incomplete in an edge case. For documents where omissions could matter, treat the Markdown as extracted content to verify, rather than as a completeness certificate. Useful checks include:
- Compare extracted text after embedded images with the corresponding source pages.
- Check expected headings, page markers, totals or other known values.
- For structured documents, inspect tables and important fields rather than relying only on the overall file’s appearance in Markdown.
These are practical validation steps, not a built-in completeness check documented by the project. The project does not establish a representative accuracy rate or silent-failure rate.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.OCR for text embedded in images requires configuration
The separate markitdown-ocr plugin documents OCR for images embedded in PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX files using an LLM vision client. Installing or enabling the plugin alone does not ensure OCR: the documented Python setup passes both an llm_client and an llm_model to MarkItDown. If no client is supplied, the plugin README says OCR is silently skipped and ordinary conversion continues; if an LLM call fails, conversion continues without that image’s text. Check the output when image text is material.
For scanned PDFs with no extractable text, the plugin README describes automatic detection and full-page rendering at 300 DPI. It also documents a PyMuPDF rendering recovery path for malformed PDFs. These are documented plugin behaviors, not a guarantee that OCR captures every image or fixes the separate inline-image extraction case described above.
Other formats and the limits of Markdown conversion
The project README lists support across format families including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, PDF, images, audio, HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, ZIP contents, YouTube URLs and EPUB. Availability depends on the relevant optional dependencies and, where applicable, plugins or external integrations; a format’s presence on the list does not mean every converter is included in a base installation.
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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesMarkdown is useful when the goal is searchable text, indexing or downstream analysis. It is not a promise to preserve page design, spreadsheet behavior, image content or every semantic relationship in the source. If the task requires image OCR, layout-aware extraction or strict completeness, choose and configure a suitable path, then validate the output against the original.
A separate CSV report illustrates why output inspection matters
A second issue, opened June 16, 2026, reported a CSV with a blank first line becoming a Markdown table with empty cells and no warning. The report used MarkItDown 0.1.6 with Python 3.12 and attributed the result to the blank first row being treated as the header, leaving subsequent rows with zero columns. This is a distinct reported CSV case, not the PDF inline-image issue. Read the CSV issue report.
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