Alterlab Markitdown

alterlab-ieu/alterlab-markitdown

Convert files and Office documents to clean, LLM-friendly Markdown with Microsoft MarkItDown (markitdown CLI/Python), supporting PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images (EXIF + OCR), audio (transcription), HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, ZIP archives, EPUB e-books, and YouTube transcript URLs, with optional AI image descriptions. Use when converting a document, PDF, slide deck, spreadsheet, scanned image, audio file, web page, or e-book into Markdown text for ingestion or LLM processing, extracting text via OCR, transcribing audio, or batch-converting mixed file formats to token-efficient Markdown. Part of the AlterLab Academic Skills suite.

18k tokens

context cost

the whole folder, loaded on every use

files

ships runnable scripts

copies elsewhere

how many repositories repackaged it

stars on the repo

on the repository, not the skill itself

Install

one command, takes just this skill from the repository

npx skills add https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-markitdown

How to use it

Copy the folder

Take alterlab-ieu/alterlab-markitdown from the repository into ~/.claude/skills for personal use, or into .claude/skills inside a project.

Check the name does not clash

The agent identifies a skill by the name field in its header. Two skills with the same name cannot sit side by side — one of them will be ignored.

Install what it needs

The instructions reference pip, uv, uvx, brew, apt, docker. Without those the skill loads but fails at the first command.