Experimental Record: MarkItDown Python Guide + MCP Guide (2026-09-23)
Corresponding drafts: devto-python-guide.md (Python library usage) and devto-mcp-guide.md (MCP server configuration) Purpose: Provide traceable first-hand evidence for these two articles, replacing estimated values. Fields that were not executed are written as TBD. Run Record Field/Content Post ID: python-guide / mcp-guide Run date: 2026-09-23 Operator: AI-assisted execution of commands, with results recorded verbatim (manual review: TBD) Environment: macOS (darwin 26.5.1, Apple Silicon), uv 0.10.8, Python 3.12 (uv venv --python=3.12) Tool/version: markitdown 0.1.8 (released on PyPI 2026-09-21), markitdown-mcp 0.0.1a7 (PyPI…
On September 23, 2026, an experiment was conducted to document the usage of the Python libraries markitdown and markitdown-mcp. The experiment was carried out using the AI assistant AI, which executed commands and recorded the results verbatim. The experiment was conducted on a macOS system with Darwin 26.5.1 and Apple Silicon architecture, using Python 3.12.
The experiment utilized two specific versions of the libraries: markitdown 0.1.8 and markitdown-mcp 0.0.1a7. The conversion mode used for the experiment was a local CLI mode, which did not involve any LLM client, plugins, or Azure services. The input files used for the experiment were sourced from the "samples/quality-gallery/files/" directory, and the output files were stored in a temporary directory.
The experiment covered 14 public fixtures, resulting in various output files, including PDF, HTML, and image files. The conversion process generally preserved the structure of the input content, such as titles, paragraphs, and simple tables. However, there were minor discrepancies in the table formatting. The experiment also found that scanned documents resulted in silent failures, outputting only a single newline character and exiting with a status code of 0.
For the MCP (Multi-Component Process) part of the experiment, the JSON-RPC protocol was used for communication between the markitdown-mcp process and the AI assistant. The initialize command responded with server information, including the server name "markitdown" and version "2025-06-18". The tools/list command returned a single tool named "convert_to_markdown", which accepted input in the form of a URI string.
The tools/call command successfully converted a PDF file to Markdown, returning the complete Markdown content as the output.
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