MarkItDown
The unglamorous parsing layer that decides whether your RAG works at all.
MarkItDown converts PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, images, audio, HTML and archives into Markdown that a model can actually read. It preserves table structure and heading hierarchy instead of flattening everything into a wall of text, which is precisely where most RAG pipelines lose the information they need. It is a library and a CLI, so it drops into an ingest job without an architecture decision.
Best for: The ingest stage of any RAG system that touches real office documents
Deploy: Self-hostable
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