Show HN:Free Online Tool to Experience Microsoft's MarkItdown

by kianworkk • 2 years ago

15 8 2 years ago

kianworkk2• 2 years ago

Hi HN,

I wanted to share a free online tool I created to let everyone easily test Microsoft's new open-source project, MarkItdown. It enables rapid conversion of different file formats and web pages into clean Markdown text. It's surprisingly fast and versatile.

Give it a try here: https://markitdown.pro/

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome!

klabetron• 2 years ago

Your files are processed directly in your browser, and no files are uploaded to our servers or stored by us.

How does it run a Python library entirely browser side? Just curious.

(Given the faff of setting up a Python environment, this is a great idea.)

Natfan2• 2 years ago

It doesn't. It seems to send a POST request to an API endpoint to do the processing (in direct contradiction with their FAQ section)

banditelol• 2 years ago

Now you make me wonder if I could run this entirely inside pyscript

internet_points• 2 years ago

How does https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown compare to pandoc?

Ah, now I see it's all in https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown/blob/main/src/markit... – beautifulsoup for htmlish stuff, pdfminer for pdf's, docx via mammoth. (And compared to pandoc, it only outputs markdown and has way fewer options.)

On a similar note, pandoc now can run completely browser-side, very bare-bones demo at https://tweag.github.io/pandoc-wasm/ (try -f html -t markdown and type in some html)

Natfan2• 2 years ago

MarkItDown operates entirely within your browser. Your files are processed directly in your browser, and no files are uploaded to our servers or stored by us. This ensures your data remains secure, and the conversion is completed safely and privately.

This is a blatant lie, by simply pressing F12, going to the Network tab, and entering in a URI into the WebPage section and pressing Enter.

    POST https://markitdown.pro/api/markitdown
    -----------------------------238398091440825138514056309576
    Content-Disposition: form-data; name="url"
    
    https://wnd.sh
    -----------------------------238398091440825138514056309576--

I understand that cross-site fetching might not work in this case, but please do not blatantly lie in your FAQ page. It makes me (and others) trust you infinitely less.

yodon• 2 years ago

Not sure whether to flag this or not, but it's definitely very sketchy in that it claims loudly to do all the work in the browser but actually posts it all to a server.

kianworkk2• 2 years ago

UPDATE: It's my mistake... The FAQ on the MVP page was generated using Gemini, and I didn't review it carefully. I've now updated the FAQ.

Show HN:Free Online Tool to Experience Microsoft's MarkItdown

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