markdown-converter

name	markdown-converter
description	Convert binary documents (PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, EPUB, images) to clean LLM-friendly Markdown using Microsoft's `markitdown` Python tool. Use when a user attaches a binary file and you need to read its contents.

markdown-converter — binary doc → markdown for agent input

markitdown is installed via pip3 install markitdown and is on PATH. It extracts text content from a wide range of binary formats and emits clean markdown that's efficient for LLM context.

Supported input formats

PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, EPUB, images (with OCR), CSV, JSON, audio transcripts, ZIP archives.

Basic usage

# Convert a single file to markdown on stdout
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf

# Save to a markdown file
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.docx > /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.md

# Convert and pipe directly into another tool
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/spec.xlsx | head -200

Reading a user-attached file

Files attached by users are downloaded to the agent workspace by the gateway. Once you have a workspace path:

# 1. Convert the binary to markdown
markitdown /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/uploads/report.pdf > /tmp/report.md

# 2. Read the markdown into your context
cat /tmp/report.md

Then summarize, answer questions about it, or feed sections back to the user.

Useful flags

Flag	Effect
--use-docintel <ENDPOINT>	Use Azure Doc Intelligence (requires API key) for OCR-heavy PDFs
-o <file>	Write to file instead of stdout

When NOT to use markdown-converter

• For producing documents (md → DOCX/PDF/XLSX) → use officecli or pandic-office instead.
• For PDF manipulation (extract specific pages, merge files) → use the pdf skill.

Troubleshooting

• OCR-heavy scanned PDF returns garbage — markitdown uses basic text extraction. If the PDF is image-only, the result will be empty or unhelpful. Mention this limitation to the user.
• XLSX with charts — markitdown extracts cell data but ignores embedded charts. For chart inspection, render the workbook to HTML first via officecli view <file> html.