Plugins

MarkItDown supports 3rd-party plugins. Plugins are disabled by default. To list installed plugins:

markitdown --list-plugins

To enable plugins use:

markitdown --use-plugins path-to-file.pdf

To 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 client

Usage

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.

Need documentation like this for your own product?

This site was built by Sonicar Tech LLC — we help SaaS, B2B, Enterprise, FinTech, and AI companies launch professional, docs-as-code documentation 60% faster and cheaper than building an in-house team, with first drafts delivered in 1 week.

Visit sonicar.tech