cat had catdoc. bat gets batdoc.
batdoc dumps .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .pptx, and .pdf files to your terminal as markdown. To a tty it syntax-highlights and pages (using bat); piped, it gives you plain text.
.docx and .xlsx are parsed structurally from their XML — headings, bold/italic, lists, tables, and hyperlinks come through properly. Spreadsheets render as markdown tables, one ## section per sheet. Hyperlinks in all formats are rendered as [text](url) in markdown.
.doc is trickier. The binary format buries style info in structures we don’t fully parse, so markdown structure is inferred heuristically from the text: numbered headings, bold subheadings, tab-delimited tables. It works well on typical business documents; your mileage varies on weirder layouts.
.xls gets a full BIFF8 parser — SST with CONTINUE record boundaries, all the cell types (LABELSST, NUMBER, RK, MULRK, FORMULA, BOOLERR), hidden sheet filtering, encryption detection. It shares the same rendering path as .xlsx.
.pptx extracts text from all shapes on each slide. Font size is used to infer heading levels. Hyperlinks on text runs are resolved and rendered as markdown links. Multi-slide decks get ## Slide N headings.
.pdf extracts text from text-based PDFs using pdf-extract. Multi-page documents get ## Page N headings in markdown mode. Scanned/image-only PDFs that contain no extractable text get a clean error message. Malformed PDFs that would crash the underlying library are caught and reported as errors rather than panics.
This is free and open source software.
Website: github.com/daemonp/batdoc
Support:
Developer: Damon Petta
License: MIT License
batdoc is written in Rust. Learn Rust with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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