Installing MarkItDown

00:00 Now back to the main goal. MarkItDown is a Python library that lets you convert formats like PDF, PowerPoint, HTML, JSON, and others into Markdown. It lets you get image descriptions with minimal and straightforward code.

00:17 And as you learned before, MarkItDown helps you reduce token usage with Markdown output. And finally, you can use MarkItDown with minimal setup through Python or the CLI.

00:29 In this course, you’ll focus on the Python library specifically, but you can check out the usage with CLI in the tutorial that this video course is based on.

00:39 In this course, you’ll focus on the Python library, but if you want to learn how you can use MarkItDown with the CLI, you can check out the Real Python tutorial this video course is based on called Python MarkItDown: Convert Documents Into LLM-Ready Markdown.

00:56 You can find the link in the materials section of this lesson. Okay, how can you install it? You’ll need to create a virtual environment. If you’d like more information about how you can do it, check out Real Python’s video course or tutorial on virtual environments.

01:14 You can find them in the materials section of this lesson. After that, you’ll install MarkItDown using pip and then verify its installation by checking its version.

01:24 Let’s go do that. Here, you have a folder called MARKITDOWN_REALPYTHON, and you’re inside the virtual environment that you’ve created before.

01:34 Now to install MarkItDown, you can say python -m pip install single quote markitdown. And then here you have to say [all].

01:49 This [all] refers to the optional dependencies that takes care of the conversion for specific formats like PDF or DOCX or PPTX. Here you’re installing all of them together.

02:01 And then you close the single quote.

02:18 Okay, looks good. Now you can verify your installation using markitdown --version.

02:27 And here you get the version. So it means you successfully installed MarkItDown.

02:34 Now it’s time to actually use MarkItDown.