7mo ago

Microsoft open-sourced a Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown

github.com

GitHub - microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.

Opensource @programming.dev

cm0002 @lemmy.world

7mo ago

Microsoft open-sourced a Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown

github.com /microsoft/markitdown

23 comments

FWIW if you are interested in such tooling consider also soffice and pandoc which have (as far as I can tell) similar features but have been existing for years now and are not related to Microsoft.
Edit: not related to Microsoft AND Google, seems the transcription aspect (which IMHO is still weird in that context but OK) is done via Google servers, cf https://lemmy.ml/post/23629310/15586865
- The single exception to this (which is actually buried fairly deep in the feature list) is the audio transcription tool. I didn't take a closer look at what is used to perform this, but at least it's not "just" document conversion like pandoc.
  
  audio transcription tool
  Thanks for the clarification but I'm a bit confused here, like audio transcription, STT, done by e.g. Whisper? If so what's the use case? When I think of Office documents audio transcription is not something I have in mind.
Huh, Beautiful Soup is still relevant. I was using it twenty years ago when it first came out.
- FYI the link in your comment got cut off before the last bracket so it's not linking to the wiki page directly.
  
  Fixed, thanks. Though it's 4 days later, so I'm not sure it will help anyone 🤷
This could be useful to me. A while ago I was trying to make something that take all unread posts from my feed reader, make an epub out of them and then put it behind an OPDS server.
I found converting HTML from RSS to first markdown and then compiling them to an epub the most reliable way to take out the unnecessary markup from the source HTML. I used pandoc for this.
- oh yeah that's definitely a good use case
- I used pandoc for this.
  Please come back and share if it's done better or worst and if so along which dimensions. Quite curious to better understand the differences.
Oh wow, this might actually be incredibly useful
- _{Not really. All the features of that tool are basic functions we've had before LibreOffice was still OpenOffice.}
  _{Since this converts to Markdown, it's inherently a very lossy conversion. What's hard to pull off is preserve the full formatting when converting to an odt or something.}
  Someone pointed out it doesn't just convert word documents to Markdown, it can also transcribe and OCR, so I guess it does have some usefulness!
  
  In your saying this isn’t useful, you’re making a lot of assumptions about how someone might want to use this.
  They may not care that it is lossy in the way that it is lossy.
  They may want a CLI tool instead of a GUI tool.
  They may want it as a Python library rather than as a stand-alone tool.
  
  I like libreoffice, but converting audio files to markdown must be a pretty recent feature, for I never heard of it before being part of libreoffice.

23 comments