explaingit

simensgreen/markitdown-vellum

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

0TypeScriptAudience · developerComplexity · 2/5Setup · easy

TLDR

A Vellum Assistant plugin that lets an AI model read office documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations as markdown text automatically.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((markitdown-vellum))
    What it does
      Converts files to markdown
      OCR for scans
      Vellum plugin
    Tech stack
      TypeScript
      Tesseract.js
      cognipeer to-markdown
    Use cases
      Read PDFs in chat
      Extract spreadsheet data
      Slide content extraction
    Audience
      Vellum users
      Developers
      Assistant builders

Code map

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filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Let a Vellum AI assistant read PDFs, spreadsheets, and slide decks without manual copying.

USE CASE 2

Extract text and tables from office documents for use in a conversation.

USE CASE 3

OCR scanned PDFs and images into readable markdown text.

USE CASE 4

Configure OCR to use either a workspace vision model or bundled Tesseract.

What is it built with?

TypeScriptNode.jsTesseract.js

How does it compare?

simensgreen/markitdown-vellum0xkinno/astraea0xkinno/halcyon
Stars000
LanguageTypeScriptTypeScriptTypeScript
Setup difficultyeasyhardhard
Complexity2/54/54/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · easy Time to first run · 30min

Runs as a plugin inside a Vellum Assistant workspace, not a standalone tool.

In plain English

markitdown-vellum is a plugin for Vellum Assistant that lets an AI model read office documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, notebooks, and archive files as plain markdown text, without a person having to open or copy the content by hand. It is built on top of an existing library called cognipeer to-markdown. The plugin adds a single tool called markitdown to the assistant. When the model points this tool at a file in the workspace, it gets back extracted text, including headings, tables, slide content, spreadsheet data, email bodies, and descriptions of images where that applies. Scanned PDFs and images are handled through optical character recognition, either by using the workspace's own vision model or by using a bundled version of Tesseract, a well known open source OCR engine. The README is clear about scope: plain text files and audio files are not supported, since the underlying library's list of supported file types leaves them out. Supported file types otherwise follow whatever the cognipeer to-markdown library supports. Installation can be done through the Vellum plugin catalog or by pulling the code from GitHub. For local development, you copy the plugin folder into the workspace's plugins directory, run npm install, and reload the plugins. Configuration happens through a config.json file in the plugin folder that survives upgrades, with settings for how long a single file conversion is allowed to take, which OCR mode to use, and what prompts get sent to the vision model during OCR. No extra system dependency is needed for the Tesseract mode, since that library is bundled in, and PDF page rendering uses a canvas module that installs automatically.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Help me install markitdown-vellum into my Vellum workspace plugins folder for local development.
Prompt 2
Explain the difference between the vellum and tesseract visionMode settings in this plugin's config.json.
Prompt 3
Show me what file types the markitdown tool supports and which ones it excludes.
Prompt 4
Walk me through customizing the visionSystemPrompt in config.json for better OCR results.

Frequently asked questions

What is markitdown-vellum?

A Vellum Assistant plugin that lets an AI model read office documents, PDFs, spreadsheets, and presentations as markdown text automatically.

What language is markitdown-vellum written in?

Mainly TypeScript. The stack also includes TypeScript, Node.js, Tesseract.js.

How hard is markitdown-vellum to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.

Who is markitdown-vellum for?

Mainly developer.

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