firecrawl-anydoc

Convert Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF files into clean GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Python bindings for the anydoc Rust crate, built by Firecrawl. Also available as a hosted API through Firecrawl Parse, which adds our OCR models for the scanned pages anydoc can't read on its own.

Every format parses into one shared document model and renders through a single Markdown serializer, so headings, tables, lists, and footnotes come out the same no matter which format goes in. Conversion releases the GIL, so other threads keep running. Type stubs ship with the package.

pip install firecrawl-anydoc

The package installs as firecrawl-anydoc and imports as anydoc.

Supported formats

Usage

import anydoc

# From a file path:
markdown = anydoc.to_markdown("report.docx")

# From bytes, with the format detected from the content:
markdown = anydoc.to_markdown_bytes(data)

# Or name it, which signature-less formats (CSV) need:
markdown = anydoc.to_markdown_bytes(data, "csv")

# Or stop at the document model, which also carries embedded assets:
document = anydoc.to_document(data)

Scanned pages

anydoc converts locally and does not do OCR, so a PDF with scanned or image-only pages raises NeedsOcrError. Opt in with ocr="hosted" to send that document to Firecrawl Parse. No signup needed. Set api_key or FIRECRAWL_API_KEY for higher limits.

markdown = anydoc.to_markdown("scan.pdf", ocr="hosted")

Errors

A conversion raises only when no complete Markdown could come out of the file. The exception type names what went wrong:

try:
    return anydoc.to_markdown(path)
except (anydoc.EncryptedError, anydoc.UnsupportedError) as error:
    # No document comes out of these, so record the file and take the next one.
    unconverted.append((path, type(error).__name__))
    return None

Every conversion failure subclasses anydoc.ConvertError, so catching that handles all of them at once. MalformedError.part and MissingPartError.part name the package part at fault, ResourceLimitError.limit names the limit crossed, and str(error) carries the whole message. A format argument naming no supported format raises ValueError.

Format detection

The format is read from the file content, using the marker its specification designates: the PDF header, the RTF open group, OLE stream names, the ZIP package mimetype and content types. CSV has no such marker, so detection returns None for it and the extension, or an explicit format, names it instead.

anydoc.format_from_bytes(data)  # 'docx', or None when nothing matches
anydoc.format_from_extension(".pptm")  # 'pptx'
anydoc.format_from_path("report.odt")  # 'odt'

Images and embedded objects

Markdown cannot embed bytes, so an embedded image renders as its alt text while the bytes stay on document.assets, tagged with a media type and the part they came from. Images that carry an external URL render as ordinary Markdown images.

Full behavior notes and benchmarks live in the repository README.

License

MIT