MarkItDown (Claude Skill)

Convert files and office documents to Markdown.

Type	Claude Skill
Supplier	K-Dense Inc. (community OSS)
Availability	GA — part of the actively maintained K-Dense scientific-agent-skills collection
Pricing	Free / OSS (MIT)
Capabilities	Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

• Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended):

  npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
  

  Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the markitdown skill when prompted. Works across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex via the Agent Skills spec (requires Node ≥ 18).

• Claude Code / Claude Desktop — manual clone:

  git clone https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
  cp -r scientific-agent-skills/skills/markitdown ~/.claude/skills/
  

  Project-scoped alternative: copy into .claude/skills/ instead of ~/.claude/skills/. The skill declares its own Python dependencies in its SKILL.md; install them (the K-Dense skills generally use uv / pip) when prompted on first use.

What it does

Convert files and office documents to Markdown. Supports PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images (with OCR), audio (with transcription), HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, ZIP, YouTube URLs, EPubs and more.

Primary use cases: Convert files and office documents to Markdown.

Notes

Distributed as a SKILL.md (plus code examples) in the K-Dense collection — Claude executes it locally via Bash/Python rather than as an MCP server. Upstream license: MIT. The skill name to enable after install is markitdown.

Sources

• K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
• skills/markitdown/SKILL.md

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