I built a desktop app for myself that turns almost any document into clean Markdown, no upload, and made it open source
Markdown is basically the language my whole setup speaks. Notes, docs, project files, all of it lives in Markdown and just works. The problem was everything that doesn’t start as Markdown, and that turned out to be a lot. PDFs, Word docs, slide decks, spreadsheets, EPUBs, web pages, even audio I wanted transcribed. Getting all of that into clean Markdown so I could actually reuse it was the missing piece.
So I built MDFlux. It’s based on microsofts library “markitdown” which is hard to setup and has a few problems, main reason i made this app, It’s a local desktop app, Windows for now. You drop a file or a whole folder and get clean Markdown back. What I wanted from it:
One tool for everything. PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, EPUB, HTML, CSV, JSON, XML, and audio, not a different converter per format.
It reads scanned PDFs and images. Naive extractors return basically nothing on an image-only page, so it runs OCR locally to pull the text back out.
It runs entirely on my machine. No upload, no account, no API key. Private stuff stays private.
Batch, because I usually had folders to get through, not one file at a time.
It’s free and MIT licensed, still very much a work in progress. Tables and formula-heavy pages are where every converter struggles, so I’d love to hear what breaks for you there.
Happy marktitdowning or whatever haha, hope it helps, i do this in my free time so let me know if it helps :)