Today, we are releasing Word to markdown converter library. It’s open source and published under Apache 2.0 license. It uses our layout engine, so it can return accurate, per-page markdown blocks (with headers, footers, and image references). We also handle fonts (Google fonts as fallback) or let you pass your font files upfront for accurate content measurement.
To our surprise, Word to per-page Markdown conversion is not a solved problem even in 2026! We initially faced this friction when preprocessing Word documents for agentic workflows. For our use case, it was important to represent per-page content in markdown. Initially, we ended up using LibreOffice sidecar to convert to PDF and then using .pdf -> .md library. This was not ideal given that LibreOffice sidecar that was sitting idle most of the time.
This is great, working on a soon to launch Markdown editor soon so this is especially relevant. I'll play around with it later but I'm curious, how are you deciding pagination boundaries? I've found word and docx and various open source projects vary on philosophy and implementation.
Thanks! Our core product is a Word editor that you can embed in your React / Vue app. So we just repurposed the layout engine to be an accurate converter. You can see how our layout engine "sees" the document in the left tab of the demo.
I've been doing some writing things where they use Docx and I use Markdown (have been since before the LLM craze). Boy is it annoying to go back and forth, will be trying the one direction anyhow
1. I have markdown, I want a docx version, that is equivalent to html rendering, markdown's whole point, almost certainly many options out there
2. I have docx, I want to make edits in markdown (because vim motions), need to sync those edits back. Ideally just some value swaps in the "DOM"
It may very well be the case that Office now supports Markdown natively. I seem to recall possibly seeing that. Google Workspace is as well iirc. One of the two already had support, the other was just releasing the first takes (back when I last looked )
Today, we are releasing Word to markdown converter library. It’s open source and published under Apache 2.0 license. It uses our layout engine, so it can return accurate, per-page markdown blocks (with headers, footers, and image references). We also handle fonts (Google fonts as fallback) or let you pass your font files upfront for accurate content measurement.
To our surprise, Word to per-page Markdown conversion is not a solved problem even in 2026! We initially faced this friction when preprocessing Word documents for agentic workflows. For our use case, it was important to represent per-page content in markdown. Initially, we ended up using LibreOffice sidecar to convert to PDF and then using .pdf -> .md library. This was not ideal given that LibreOffice sidecar that was sitting idle most of the time.
This issue is addressed with docx-to-markdown library. it can be used directly in your Typescript ingestion pipeline. Try with your docs at https://www.docx-editor.dev/solutions/word-to-markdown.
(if you catch any bugs please let us know in the comments / or file gh issues)
This is great, working on a soon to launch Markdown editor soon so this is especially relevant. I'll play around with it later but I'm curious, how are you deciding pagination boundaries? I've found word and docx and various open source projects vary on philosophy and implementation.
Thanks! Our core product is a Word editor that you can embed in your React / Vue app. So we just repurposed the layout engine to be an accurate converter. You can see how our layout engine "sees" the document in the left tab of the demo.
How hard is it to go the other direction?
I've been doing some writing things where they use Docx and I use Markdown (have been since before the LLM craze). Boy is it annoying to go back and forth, will be trying the one direction anyhow
Docx to markdown is a lossy conversion, so getting .docx back is possible but will lose most formatting details
In this case, I would imagine two scenarios
1. I have markdown, I want a docx version, that is equivalent to html rendering, markdown's whole point, almost certainly many options out there
2. I have docx, I want to make edits in markdown (because vim motions), need to sync those edits back. Ideally just some value swaps in the "DOM"
It may very well be the case that Office now supports Markdown natively. I seem to recall possibly seeing that. Google Workspace is as well iirc. One of the two already had support, the other was just releasing the first takes (back when I last looked )