"Any document in. Markdown out."

What is anydoc Overview

anydoc is a fast, open-source Rust library by Firecrawl that converts office documents — Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF — into clean GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM).

Its mission is simple: clear the document-reading bottleneck for the LLM era. When you need to feed a .docx report, a .pptx deck, or an .xlsx dataset to a language model, anydoc turns it into well-structured, noise-free Markdown. Median conversion time is under 5 milliseconds per document, and it is the conversion engine behind Firecrawl Parse.

It is not another wrapper around office tooling: no LibreOffice, no OCR services, no ML models. Conversion is a pure local parse.

Core features Highlights

• One output standard: every format parses into a shared document model and renders through the same Markdown serializer. Heading anchors, bold/italic/strike, inline code and code blocks, links and internal cross-references, bullet/numbered/nested/task lists (original numbering preserved), tables with merged cells, block quotes, footnotes and endnotes, speaker notes — identical behavior across formats.
• Embedded assets kept: images and embedded objects render as alt text in Markdown, while the raw bytes stay on the document model with their media types; external URL images become regular Markdown images.
• Content-based format detection: the format is read from the bytes (PDF headers, RTF open groups, OLE stream names, ZIP mimetype) — mislabeled files still convert.
• Millisecond performance: pure Rust, median conversion under 5ms.
• Local PDF support: text-based PDFs convert locally through pdf-inspector; no OCR service.
• Five bindings: Node.js (libuv thread pool, non-blocking), Python (releases the GIL), WebAssembly (in-browser, files never leave the device), CLI, and Agent Skill.
• Agent-ready: one npx skills add firecrawl/anydoc command lets Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor read office documents.
• Safety: fixed limits on decompression, nesting depth, and node count protect against zip bombs.
• Thoroughly tested: snapshot tests, mutation testing, and per-format cargo-fuzz fuzzing targets.

Architecture How it works

The design philosophy fits in one sentence: one model, every format.

.docx / .xls / .pdf / .epub / ...
        │
        ▼
  per-format parsers
        │
        ▼
  ┌─────────────────────┐
  │  unified Document     │ ← every format converges here
  │  model                │
  └─────────────────────┘
        │
        ▼
  unified Markdown serializer
        │
        ▼
   GitHub-Flavored Markdown

Key dependencies:

Dependency	Purpose
Rust	Core language, compiled to native / WebAssembly
calamine	Excel parsing (xlsx/xls/xlsb etc.)
pdf-inspector	Local PDF conversion
flate2	Compression stream handling
wasm-bindgen	WebAssembly bindings
maturin	Python packaging

Note: anydoc does not depend on markitdown, the firecrawl SDK, or LibreOffice — it is Firecrawl's own standalone engine, used directly by Firecrawl Parse.

Supported formats Format list

Category	Extensions
Word	.doc .docx .docm
PowerPoint	.ppt .pps .pot .pptx .pptm .ppsx .ppsm
Excel	.xls .xlsx .xlsm .xlsb
OpenDocument	.odt .ods .odp
Rich Text Format	.rtf
EPUB	.epub
CSV	.csv
PDF	.pdf

14 formats in total — the widest coverage among comparable tools (for reference: libreoffice 12/14, unstructured 8/14, markitdown 6/14, pandoc 5/14, docling 4/14, mammoth 1/14).

Benchmark Performance

Firecrawl's official benchmark ran 100 real documents across 14 formats against seven converters (score 0-100, higher is better; speed is median conversion time):

Tool	Formats	Median	Score	Completeness	Structure	Fidelity	Cleanliness
anydoc	14/14	4.4ms	81	87	79	78	81
libreoffice	12/14	1129.5ms	40	59	42	40	24
unstructured	8/14	572.9ms	58	63	76	59	51
markitdown	6/14	134.8ms	33	65	78	66	60
pandoc	5/14	102.1ms	34	56	74	57	56
docling	4/14	513.6ms	21	57	60	60	57
mammoth	1/14	52.5ms	8	70	84	71	75

The takeaway: broadest format support, fastest speed, and the highest quality across the board. See the benchmark page for a deeper read.

License MIT

anydoc is released under the MIT License — free to use, modify, and sell. Source lives at github.com/firecrawl/anydoc, published to crates.io (Rust), npm (Node/WASM/CLI), and PyPI (Python).

Try it now Get started

• Don't want to install anything? Drag a document into the online converter on the home page — it runs locally in your browser.
• Want it in your project? Pick your language on the install page.
• Want the full tour? Head to the guide.

One-liner

anydoc = 14 formats + one document model + one Markdown output + millisecond speed — fully local, MIT-licensed, and agent-friendly.

Contributors: souvc