markitdown-rs

markitdown-rs converts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML, EPUB, Outlook and web pages to Markdown for LLMs and RAG pipelines. It is Microsoft's markitdown CLI rewritten in Rust as one 4.5 MB binary: the same command and the same Markdown, byte for byte, without a Python environment. From the command line it is usually hundreds of times faster (median 408× over 231 real-world files, about 15× on the largest PDFs and spreadsheets); in process, 4–50× faster.

brew install majiayu000/tap/markitdown-rs   # or: cargo install markitdown-rs
markitdown report.pdf > report.md

Prebuilt binaries for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Linux x86_64 are on the releases page. It also runs as an MCP server for AI agents (markitdown mcp, stdio or HTTP) and has a Python module with markitdown's API, plugins included.

Example

A PDF form becomes a Markdown table, exactly as markitdown renders it (tests/fixtures/pdf/gen-form-mixed.pdf):

$ markitdown order.pdf
Purchase order summary
| Item     | Qty | Unit price | Total |
| -------- | --- | ---------- | ----- |
| Widget 1 | 1   | 1.50       | 1.50  |
| Widget 2 | 2   | 3.00       | 6.00  |
| Widget 3 | 3   | 4.50       | 13.50 |
...
Thank you for your order.

URLs work too, with markitdown's Wikipedia and YouTube handling:

$ markitdown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown | head -3
# Markdown

Plain text markup language

markitdown-rs vs. the alternatives

Full feature-by-feature table, with how each number was measured: markitdown vs markitdown-rs.

Why

markitdown is the de facto "documents to Markdown for LLMs" tool, but using it from a shell, CI job or non-Python service means shipping a Python environment with mammoth, pdfminer.six, pdfplumber, pandas, openpyxl, BeautifulSoup, python-pptx, magika and onnxruntime. Its most requested features include brew and binary installs (#1179, #25) and lighter dependencies (#1234).

markitdown-rs targets output compatibility. It does not try to produce "better" Markdown: it reproduces markitdown's output, quirks included (pipes in table cells, Heading 7–9 as plain text, pdfminer's (cid:N) placeholders, pandas' NaN cells), so you can swap the binary without changing anything downstream.

Compatibility

Every fixture is converted by both implementations and compared byte for byte in cargo test against Python markitdown 0.1.9 (see Parity testing): 408 files, the 6,705 inputs of the

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