Ask HN: How should I convert Microsoft Word documents to Markdown?

5 pointsby lkrubner21 दिन पहले8 comments

I took over a project that was built by an overseas team. They set up a data ingestion process. They have a step in the ingestion where they use Libre Office (in headless mode) to convert Microsoft Word documents to PDFs. Later we convert all PDFs to Markdown. They felt that it was best to convert everything to a PDF, and then convert all of the PDFs to Markdown.

What I notice is that LibreOffice can create very complex PDFs when the Microsoft Word document has:

1. tables

2. multiple columns

3. strikethrough text

I am thinking we should go straight from Microsoft Word to Markdown.

What is the right software for that?

9 comments

mackatsol21 दिन पहले

Pandoc is awesome for this: `pandoc input.docx -o output.md` There's more you can do, with style sheets and so on, which you will likely have to dig into for the tables and multiple columns to come out the way you want. You can also extract media files from inside a docx file: `pandoc --extract-media=. input.docx -o output.md`

verdverm21 दिन पहले

Native support: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introd...

Microsoft OSS python: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown

There seem to be many addons that enable this, and pandoc as others have suggested

qup21 दिन पहले

I'd give an llm a shot before I ruled it out.

I had it generating .docx the other day and it did pretty well, so I assume it understands the format just fine.

And they're excellent at markdown.

topaztee13 दिन पहले

sure but OOXML is on avg 12x~ larger than markdown so you'll burn a ton of tokens. I second using pandoc but depends on why you need it to be in markdown in the first place?

(source - I'm working on a docx MCP that abstracts OOXML complexity away from LLMs entirely)

kha1n3vol321 दिन पहले

Start with pandoc before reinventing the wheel.

ramoz21 दिन पहले

Pandoc might be able to do this, found this:

https://gist.github.com/plembo/409a8d7b1bae66622dbcd26337bbb...

dhruvyads21 दिन पहले

Claude Code can do these types of really well unless you're trying to convert in bulk

[deleted]13 दिन पहले

snailshare21 दिन पहले

Pandoc can do this I think