markitdown

The source of it: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

How does https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown compare to pandoc? Ah, now I see it's all in https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/main/src/markit... – beautifulsoup for htmlish stuff, pdfminer for pdf's, docx via mammoth. (And compared to pandoc, it only outputs markdown and has way fewer options.) On a similar note, pandoc now can run completely browser-side, very bare-bones demo at https://tweag.github.io/pandoc-wasm/ (try -f html -t markdown and type in some html)

Looking at the code, it looks like they used existing Python packages to read and parse MS Office formats, not what I expected, seeing that the repo is in Microsoft's org on GitHub I expected them to have used Microsoft's "official" libraries for parsing these formats, through Component Object Model (COM). They used Mammoth for docx (Word) [1][2] Python-pptx for ppt (PowerPoint) [3][4] and Pandas for XSLX (Excel) [5] [1] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3... [2] https://pypi.org/project/mammoth/ [3] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3... [4] https://pypi.org/project/python-pptx/ [5] https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/70ab149ff1657c3...

Though it promises to convert everything to Markdown, it seems to be a worse version of what the already existing tools such as PDFtotext, docx2txt, pptx2md, ... collected [here] do without even pretending to export to Markdown. Looking at its [source], it indeed seems to be a wrapper to python variants of those. Making the pool smaller can hardly improve the output. [here] https://github.com/Konfekt/vim-office [source] htps://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/main/src/markitdown/_markitdown.py

For PDFs it's entirely a wrapper around https://pdfminersix.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/highle... - https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/main/src/markit... So if that's your use case, PDFMiner might be better to integrate with directly!

Nary a mention of LLMs in the readme. That was an unexpected but pleasant surprise, when the idea of converting something to markdown for LLMs is floated as if it's new and the greatest thing since sliced bread. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... It's interesting to read the code. It's mostly glue code, and most of it is in single 1101 line file. But it does indeed say what the README says it does. Here is the special handling for Wikipedia: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/main/src/markit... Edit: good to see the one from yesterday flagged. I tried to assume good intent, but also wondered if it was a place to draw a line in the sand. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42405758 Edit 2: ah, it came down to simple violation of the Show HN rules. I didn't notice, but yeah, that's definitely the case