Markdownify MCP

Markdownify turns almost anything into Markdown, the plain-text format Claude reads best. Point it at a YouTube link, a PDF, a spreadsheet or a voice memo, and Claude gets clean text it can summarise, quote or rewrite.

Setup means downloading and building it once, which needs Bun (a tool for running JavaScript projects). The converters come from Microsoft's MarkItDown. You can limit which folders it can read with MD_ALLOWED_PATHS.

It's a community project with lots of tools in one place. For tricky PDFs with big tables, Docling does a better job.

• Turn PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files into Markdown
• Grab a web page or Bing search results as clean text
• Get the transcript of a YouTube video
• Transcribe audio files
• Pull text and details out of images

Open your terminal (the text window where you run Claude Code) in your project folder, then paste this command to connect it:

claude mcp add markdownify -- node /full/path/to/markdownify-mcp/dist/index.js

Other ways to set it up:

# Build it first (needs Bun; it sets up its own Python for the converters):
git clone https://github.com/zcaceres/markdownify-mcp.git
cd markdownify-mcp
bun install
bun run build
# Or use Docker (no audio or image tools in this version):
docker run --rm -i -v "$HOME/Documents:/data:ro" -e MD_ALLOWED_PATHS=/data mcp/markdownify

Anyone who wants Claude to work with videos, audio and odd file types, not just text.

• YouTube transcripts
• Converting Office files
• Saving web pages as text
• Transcribing voice memos