markitdown
Category: literature-review · License: MIT · Version: 2.2 · Includes scripts
Tags: document conversion, PDF to Markdown, Word, PowerPoint, text extraction
When to use it
Converts documents to Markdown with Microsoft MarkItDown (Python API, markitdown CLI, markitdown-ocr plugin, markitdown-mcp server), covering PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, CSV, EPUB, ZIP, and streams, plus Azure extraction. Use when preparing papers or reports for LLM/RAG ingestion; when batch-converting a literature folder to Markdown with provenance; when converting uploaded bytes or file streams; when OCR of scanned PDFs or image text is needed; when exposing conversion to a local agent through MCP. Do not use for bounding boxes or page coordinates (use LiteParse) or PDF merge/split/forms (use the pdf skill).Example requests
Ask your agent in plain language, for example:- “How do I turn a .docx into markdown with python? Want it clean for feeding to an LLM.”
- “I have ~300 PDFs in ./lit/ named like Smith_2025_CRISPR-screens.pdf and I need them as .md files for a RAG index. I want each one to record where it came from, and ideally they’d be grouped by year. Some are scans, though. What’s the cleanest way to do this on Windows?”
- “My web backend receives uploaded report files as raw bytes (no filename on disk). I need to extract their text as markdown for a summarizer, and I’m worried about untrusted content. What should I do?”
Install
/plugin marketplace add KalarisLabs/research-agent-skills and install the whole literature-review category with /plugin install literature-review@research-agent-skills.