Plugins
Extend MarkItDown with 3rd-party plugins, including the markitdown-ocr plugin for LLM-powered OCR on PDF, DOCX, PPTX and XLSX files.
MarkItDown supports 3rd-party plugins. Plugins are disabled by default. To list installed plugins:
markitdown --list-pluginsTo enable plugins use:
markitdown --use-plugins path-to-file.pdfTo find available plugins, search GitHub for the hashtag #markitdown-plugin. To develop a
plugin, see packages/markitdown-sample-plugin.
markitdown-ocr plugin
The markitdown-ocr plugin adds OCR support to PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX converters, extracting
text from embedded images using LLM Vision — the same llm_client / llm_model pattern that
MarkItDown already uses for image descriptions. No new ML libraries or binary dependencies
required.
Installation
pip install markitdown-ocr
pip install openai # or any OpenAI-compatible clientUsage
Pass the same llm_client and llm_model you would use for image descriptions:
from markitdown import MarkItDown
from openai import OpenAI
md = MarkItDown(
enable_plugins=True,
llm_client=OpenAI(),
llm_model="gpt-4o",
)
result = md.convert("document_with_images.pdf")
print(result.markdown)If no llm_client is provided the plugin still loads, but OCR is silently skipped and the
standard built-in converter is used instead.
See packages/markitdown-ocr/README.md for detailed
documentation.
Optional Dependencies
Full list of MarkItDown's optional pip extras for PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, Outlook, Azure integrations, audio and YouTube transcription.
Content Understanding
Use Azure Content Understanding with MarkItDown for structured field extraction, video and audio support, and higher-quality document conversion.