llm-markdownify

Turn PDFs, scans and images into clean Markdown with the vision model you already pay for. Built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

pip install llm-markdownify
markdownify report.pdf -o report.md --model gpt-5.4-mini

Each page goes to a vision LLM with a prompt we measure on a public benchmark, so the Markdown comes back the way a retriever or an agent wants it:

• the text exactly as printed, in reading order, including multi-column layouts
• no running headers, footers or page numbers polluting your chunks
• math as LaTeX ($...$, $$...$$)
• tables as Markdown, or as HTML when they have merged cells, and stitched back together when they break across pages
• charts as a description plus the data values, diagrams as Mermaid
• old scans and handwriting transcribed, not summarized

It works with any provider: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, Azure, OpenRouter, or a model running on your own machine through Ollama, LM Studio or vLLM.

How good is it?

We measure every change on olmOCR-Bench, the benchmark most PDF-to-Markdown tools publish. It checks 1,403 real pages with about 7,000 pass/fail tests: is this sentence present, is the page footer gone, is paragraph A before paragraph B, is this table cell next to that one, does this equation render the same.

llm-markdownify with gpt-6-luna scores 81.6 ± 1.0 on the full benchmark (measured on 0.5; 1.0 uses the same prompt and scored the same on the 105-page subset, 84.9).

By category: tables 89.1, headers/footers 86.6, old scans with math 82.5, multi-column 81.4, arXiv math 79.4, tiny text 88.7, old scans 45.1. Old, faded scans are the weak spot.

What the library adds on top of the model, measured on a fixed 105-page stratified subset:

The biggest single difference is headers and footers. With the bare prompt, 24% of the checks that running headers, footers and page numbers are gone pass (88% with llm-markdownify). Left in, that furniture ends up in every RAG chunk. Other projects' numbers are what they published; ours come from running the benchmark's own scorer on our output.

Reproduce it yourself with evals/olmocr_bench. The harness scores the Markdown this library writes, through the same convert() call you would use.

Quickstart

export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-..."

markdownify input.pdf -o output.md --model gpt-5.4-mini   # PDF
markdownify scan.png -o scan.md --model gpt-5.4-mini      # PNG, JPG, WEBP, TIFF (multi-page), BMP, GIF
markdownify big.pdf -o part.md --pages 1-5,12,40-         # only the pages you need

From Python, get the Markdown back directly:

from llm_markdownify import markdownify

result = markdownify("report.pdf", model="gpt-5.4-mini")  # or bytes, a file object, or a URL
result.markdown  # the whole document
result.page(7).markdown  # one page
result.failed_pages  # [] when every page converted
result.usage  # requests, tokens, estimated cost in USD

convert("input.pdf", "output.md", ...) writes a file instead, and amarkdownify() is the async version for web servers.

If a page still fails after retries, the rest of the document is kept: the failed page is marked with an HTML comment and listed in result.failed_pages (the command exits with code 3). Answers are cached on disk, so running the same command again only pays for the pages that failed. Pass strict=True / --strict to fail the whole document instead, or --no-cache to skip the cache.

Use any provider

The model name decides where the request goes (via LiteLLM, 100+ providers). Set that provider's key and pick a vision-capable model.

Anything that speaks the OpenAI API works too, including local servers with no key at all:

# Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp, or a hosted OpenAI-compatible provider
markdownify input.pdf -o output.md --model openai/<model-name> --api-base http://localhost:11434/v1

Use it from AI agents

As a tool (MCP server). Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP clients can call llm-markdownify directly. The server has two tools: document_info (page count, no model call) and convert_document (converts up to 20 pages per call and says which pages are left, so a long PDF does not flood the agent's context).

# Claude Code
claude mcp add markdownify -e OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-... \
  -- uvx --from "llm-markdownify[mcp]" markdownify-mcp --model gpt-5.4-mini --root ~/Documents

Other clients take the same command in their JSON config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "markdownify": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "llm-markdownify[mcp]", "markdownify-mcp", "--model", "gpt-5.4-mini",
               "--root", "/Users/you/Documents"],
      "env": { "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..." }
    }
  }
}

MCP servers do not inherit your shell's environment, so pass the provider key in env as above. The agent can only read files inside the --root folders; without --root the server uses the folder it starts in, and refuses to start if that is / or your home folder. URLs on private or local addresses are refused unless you add --allow-private-urls, and the agent cannot switch to a different (possibly more expensive) model unless you add --allow-model-override.

From the shell. With no -o, the Markdown goes to stdout and logs to stderr, so it pipes:

uvx llm-markdownify report.pdf --pages 1-3 | head -50     # nothing to install first
markdownify report.pdf --json | jq '.failed_pages, .usage' # structured result

Exit codes: 0 every page converted, 1 nothing usable (bad key, unreadable file), 2 bad arguments, 3 some pages failed and the rest were written.

Large jobs, low latency

Thousands of documents and no one waiting? markdownify-batch sends them through the OpenAI Batch API or Anthropic Message Batches at about half the price, finished within 24 hours:

markdownify-batch submit ./archive -o ./archive-md --model gpt-5.4-mini   # or anthropic/claude-opus-5
markdownify-batch status ./archive-md
markdownify-batch collect ./archive-md --retry-failed

Someone waiting on the answer? Use a fast model and skip the cross-page check:

markdownify doc.pdf -o doc.md --model gpt-5.4-mini --no-grouping --concurrency 16   # ~5 s per page

No API at all? Serve a vision model locally with LM Studio, Ollama, vLLM or llama.cpp and pass --api-base. Measured speed and quality trade-offs, and the local setup guide, are in docs/speed-and-cost.md.

Built for production

• Safe to call from threads. Use convert() from a web server or a worker pool. Each conversion keeps its own retry, rate-limit, cache and provider settings, including its API key.
• Quiet as a library. convert() prints nothing; your app's logging config decides what is shown (logging.basicConfig(level=logging.INFO) for progress messages). Pass log_level="normal" for the same output as the command-line tool.
• Rate limits are waited out, real errors fail fast. Rate limits, timeouts and 5xx responses are retried with backoff. A bad key or a bad request fails on the first attempt with one clear line, and never prints your API key.
• Oversized pages are handled. Page images are capped at 2048 px, below provider limits, so big scans don't get rejected.
• Re-runs are free. Answers are cached on disk (~/.cache/llm-markdownify, or $LLM_MARKDOWNIFY_CACHE_DIR), keyed on the exact page image and prompt. The cache holds the converted text of your documents and is never pruned: for confidential documents, turn it off (--no-cache, enable_cache=False) or delete the folder when you are done.
• Safe with untrusted URLs. URL input refuses private, local and cloud-metadata addresses, including through redirects (--allow-private-urls to permit them). Other strings are read as local file paths, so only pass trusted strings as the source.
• One bad page does not sink a 300-page document. It is marked and reported; rerun to fill it in.
• Throughput and cost controls: --concurrency, --rate-limit, --max-image-px, --reasoning-effort.

Options

Custom prompts: copy a built-in profile from prompt_profiles.py into a JSON file with the fields name, continuation_system, continuation_user, markdown_system and markdown_user, then pass --profile my_profile.json.

DOCX input goes through Microsoft Word (macOS/Windows): pip install "llm-markdownify[docx]" and pass --allow-docx. Exporting to PDF yourself is more reliable.

Examples

The gallery has about 80 inputs with their Markdown output: receipts, charts, handwriting, formulas, forms, screenshots, scene text.

Roadmap

Next up: an in-memory API that returns per-page results, stdout output and page ranges for agents, an MCP server, a hybrid mode that uses the PDF's own text layer to cut cost, and presets for small local models. Details and current numbers are in docs/ROADMAP.md.

Markdownify Cloud

To run Markdownify in production on your own infrastructure, with your own LLMs, or tuned for your documents, see markdownify.xyz. The cloud version adds features beyond the open-source library and comes with hands-on integration support.

Contributing

uv sync --all-extras --dev
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check src tests evals scripts

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Maintainers and coding agents: start with AGENTS.md.

License

Apache 2.0. If you distribute this project, keep the LICENSE and NOTICE files intact, crediting the original author, Sethu Pavan Venkata Reddy Pastula.