Docmd.Cli 0.2.5

docmd

Converts Microsoft Word documents to Markdown — for retrieval indexes, documentation pipelines, or simply to read them somewhere other than Word.

$ dotnet tool install -g Docmd.Cli
$ docmd report.docx -o out/

Accepts .docx, .docm, .dotx and .dotm. Word 97-2003 .doc is a different, binary format, and docmd refuses it rather than guessing. Convert those first:

$ soffice --headless --convert-to docx --outdir ./converted ./*.doc

It tells you what it could not read

Most converters lose content silently: a callout in a text box, a customer name in a content control, a table row behind a legacy wrapper. The output still looks like a document.

docmd measures every conversion. It compares the words a reader can see in the .docx against the words a Markdown parser recovers from its own output, and reports what did not survive, naming the structure responsible:

! 2 of 3754 words did not survive conversion (99.9 % kept).
!   missing 'Here' near "the Discount List Click Here Click 'Add' to use"
!   one of them sits inside <drawing>.

Silent when nothing is lost. On a 49-document sample of real business documents spanning 2008 to 2024, measured 2026-09-10: all 49 convert, 43 lose not one word, and total loss is twelve words — under 0.01%. Those figures are a dated measurement against a fixed corpus, not a promise about your documents, which is why the tool measures yours too.

The conversion is a stylesheet you can edit

The entire semantic layer — which paragraph is a heading, which run is emphasis, how a Word list becomes a Markdown one — is one XSLT 3.0 stylesheet, not compiled code.

$ docmd --print-stylesheet > mine.xslt
$ docmd report.docx --stylesheet mine.xslt

--print-stylesheet emits the copy that actually ran, so you edit what executed. There is no plugin API to learn: the extension point is the implementation.

For smaller adjustments, a style map tells docmd what your template's own styles mean:

CautionNote:   { as: blockquote, prefix: "Caution: " }
ProcedureStep: { as: ordered-list-item }
PartNumber:    { as: inline-code }

$ docmd report.docx --style-map house-styles.yaml

Deterministic

The same input, version and options produce byte-identical Markdown: LF endings everywhere, culture-invariant formatting, no timestamps, UTF-8 without a BOM. These files land in git repos and RAG stores that re-index on content change; one unstable byte re-embeds a corpus whose text never moved.

Options

Links

• Documentation: https://phoenixml.dev/tools/docmd
• How it was built, and what a stylesheet gets wrong: https://phoenixml.dev/notes/introducing-docmd
• Source: https://github.com/phoenixmldb/docmd
• What it knowingly drops, and the measured figures: https://github.com/phoenixmldb/docmd/blob/main/docs/limitations.md
• Found a document it handles badly? https://github.com/phoenixmldb/docmd/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md — you can report a loss without sending us the document, and that is the single most useful thing you can contribute.

Built on the PhoenixmlDb.Xslt engine. Apache-2.0.