GitHub - microsoft/markitdown: Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown.
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Python tool for converting files and office documents to Markdown. - microsoft/markitdown
  • utopiah@lemmy.ml
    47·
    1 day ago

    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

    • haverholm@kbin.earth
      6·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • utopiah@lemmy.ml
        4·
        2 days ago

        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.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    121·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • utopiah@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
      71·
      2 days ago

      ~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!

      • davel@lemmy.mlEnglish
        101·
        2 days ago

        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.
        • vort3@lemmy.ml
          3·
          2 days ago

          I convert from docx to md specifically with the purpose of getting rid of Microsoft formatting aka almost converting to plaintext but preserve at least some structure.

        • utopiah@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 days ago

          soffice works as CLI, can be called from Python and has plenty of related tooling, e.g. https://pypi.org/project/unoserver/ so I agree, I’m confused at what’s actually novel and better than that or even dedicated long lasting FLOSS projects like pandoc.

      • django@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        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.