markitdown-plasmate

A MarkItDown plugin that converts live URLs via Plasmate instead of BeautifulSoup — returning 10-100x fewer tokens with no API key required.

Why?

MarkItDown's built-in HTML converter fetches a URL, strips <script> tags, and converts whatever remains with BeautifulSoup. For a typical news article that means ~60,000 tokens of navigation menus, cookie banners, sidebar widgets, and footer links wrapped around ~2,000 tokens of actual content.

Plasmate is an open-source Rust browser engine that renders the page properly and returns only the meaningful content as clean Markdown. The token difference is significant:

Site	Raw HTML (BeautifulSoup)	Plasmate	Reduction
TechCrunch article	~75,000 tokens	~975 tokens	77×
Average (45 sites)	~45,000 tokens	~2,500 tokens	17.7×

The plugin slots in specifically for http:// and https:// URL inputs — local files (PDF, Word, Excel, etc.) continue to use MarkItDown's native converters unchanged.

Installation

pip install markitdown-plasmate
pip install plasmate          # the Rust browser engine

Or with cargo:

cargo install plasmate

Usage

CLI

markitdown --use-plugins https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/some-article/

Python

from markitdown import MarkItDown

md = MarkItDown(enable_plugins=True)
result = md.convert("https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-crawler-traffic-by-purpose-and-industry/")
print(result.markdown)
# → clean article content, ~2,000 tokens instead of ~60,000

Options

Pass plugin options via MarkItDown kwargs:

md = MarkItDown(
    enable_plugins=True,
    plasmate_format="markdown",   # markdown | text | som | links
    plasmate_timeout=30,          # seconds
    plasmate_selector="article",  # CSS selector to scope extraction
)

Or use PlasmateConverter directly:

from markitdown_plasmate import PlasmateConverter
from markitdown import MarkItDown

md = MarkItDown()
md.register_converter(PlasmateConverter(output_format="markdown", selector="main"))
result = md.convert("https://example.com")

Output formats

Format	Description
markdown	Clean Markdown (default)
text	Plain text, no markup
som	Structured Object Model — semantic JSON tree
links	Extracted hyperlinks only

When it applies

The plugin only intercepts http:// and https:// URLs. All other MarkItDown input types (PDF, Word, Excel, images, audio, local HTML files) are unaffected.

Requirements

• Python 3.10+
• markitdown >= 0.1.0
• plasmate binary on PATH (pip install plasmate or cargo install plasmate)

The plugin is constructable without the binary — ImportError is raised on the first conversion attempt with clear install instructions.

Related

• Plasmate — the open-source Rust browser engine
• somspec.org — Structured Object Model specification
• MarkItDown — the Python file-to-Markdown converter this plugin extends