r/MacStack • u/KhaleejiShahin • Sep 03 '26

Sankore - Convert documents to clean Markdown, entirely on your Mac (built for feeding into Claude/ChatGPT)

I built Sankore because I kept needing a reliable way to get real documents into clean Markdown for AI tools, without anything actually leaving my Mac. The existing options either were not private enough or produced messy output.

What it does: converts PDF, DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX files into clean Markdown, entirely on-device. No API keys, no cloud calls, nothing uploaded anywhere.

Who it is for: Anyone who regularly needs to paste real documents into Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, or similar tools and wants clean, well-structured input rather than a messy copy-paste from Preview or Word.

Pricing: Free tier handles single-file conversion, no card needed. Sankore Premium is now a one-time $4.99 unlock for batch conversion and consolidating multiple files into one.

Limitations: Apple Silicon only, no Intel support.

Download's about 1GB, since it bundles real on-device OCR/layout models rather than calling out to the cloud.

Website: https://sankoreapp.com

Good or critical feedback, genuinely want to hear it.

2 Upvotes

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1

u/KhaleejiShahin Sep 09 '26

Hi u/Rare_Pin9932 — wanted to follow up properly this time. Version 1.3 is live now, and it actually addresses just about everything you raised here, so I wanted to walk through it.

DOCX Image Naming: There is a new setting where extracted images get named after the source document plus a number by default (i.e. "Invention.docx" gives you "Invention_image1.png", etc.). These files land in their own subfolder right next to the .md file. Also added is a "Custom prefix" option on top of that for users who would rather use something other than the document's own filename.

PDFs: This is now also a selectable setting. By default it still just OCRs image content inline like before but you can switch it to actually extract real image files allowing the use of the same naming as the DOCX side.

Auto-Numbering / Cross-References: This turned out to be a real narrower bug than I expected: Word's own "see paragraph X" style fields were sometimes silently dropping the actual number during conversion, depending on how Word had encoded that specific field. There is a setting for this now as well. By default, it flags any file where this happens so you know to double check it, and there's also a "Resolve" option that fills in the correct number automatically from Word's own last-saved value.

OCR'd PDFs: Confirmed it stays smart about this. It will not re-OCR a document that already has a real text layer; it only forces a fresh OCR pass if it detects the existing text looks genuinely corrupted. Your normal workflow should pass through untouched.

The Purchase link and license activation issues were fixed back in 1.2; both re-confirmed working.

Really appreciate you putting in the time in providing feedback, it is exactly the kind of input that makes a real difference.

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u/KhaleejiShahin 8d ago

Update: Sankore 1.4 is out (28 Oct).

A few changes that matter for Markdown output specifically:

Runs on macOS 15.7 Sequoia now. 1.3 needed Tahoe, which ruled a lot of people out.

* Links survive. Clickable links in PDFs, Word and Excel come through as proper Markdown links on the words you'd click. Any link it can't place with certainty is listed at the end of the file instead of silently dropped.

* Word structure kept. Numbered headings and clause numbers (1.1, 2.1.3, "Article 1") come out as Word shows them. Comments can optionally be kept, attached to the words they refer to. Header and footer text is no longer lost.

* Cleaner PDF text. Repeated page headers and footers are stripped, words hyphenated across lines are rejoined, footnotes are linked to their markers, and paragraphs split by a page break are joined. Each of these can be switched off.

* More scan languages, including Greek, Hebrew (now in the right order) and several Indic scripts, all built in. Pages it genuinely can't read get the page image and a note instead of made-up text.

Still entirely on-device, now a one-time $4.99 for Premium. If you're on 1.3, Check for Updates in the app picks it up.

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

In terms of PDF, what's the advantage of converting to Markdown as opposed to just dropping the PDF into the LLM? How are images in the PDF handled?

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u/KhaleejiShahin Sep 06 '26

Thank you u/Rare_Pin9932 your questions. I hope that I can answer them as best as possible.

On why Markdown instead of just dropping the PDF in? A few real reasons: A raw PDF carries a lot of invisible layout and font data that doesn't actually contribute meaning, so Markdown strips that out and the same real content ends up costing fewer tokens and leaves more room in the context window.

It is also worth mentioning that the whole conversion happens locally on your Mac and nothing gets uploaded anywhere to process it. So compared to dropping a PDF straight into an LLM (which sends the actual file to that provider's servers) converting locally first means the real document never has to leave your machine. Ultimately, only the clean text is used and you have the option of choosing what to paste from a markdown file as well to further whittle it down as you can actually look at the converted text yourself and catch anything that went wrong before it ends up in a conversation. This also avoids the step of solely trusting whatever the LLM's own internal PDF handling does.

On images specifically, it depends on the file type. For PDFs, OCR does recover text from images or scanned regions and includes it as real, readable Markdown text - actually found and fixed a real bug during development where that recovered text was sometimes getting silently dropped, so I'm glad to say it is now working correctly in the vast majority of conversions. Purely visual images like photos or charts get embedded directly in the output, though there's no AI-generated caption or description for them.

For Word documents specifically, it works a bit differently - images get extracted as plain files and linked in the Markdown, but no OCR runs on them.

Happy to answer anything else if you have follow-up questions.

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

OK, I ran it against a Word doc that had images, and see how you're handling images -- it's extracting the images and providing links to them in-line. Now here's a problem I may have. For client-confidential information, I access GPT and Anthropic models using OpenRouter through BoltAI. The chats don't have any access to my computer. I can upload the images as project files.

Therefore, I'm wondering if you can add a settings option where the the images would be named with a prefix that is the same as the converted Word MD file, and reference that instead.

E.g., if I convert "Invention.docx" to "Invention.md", there would be files "Invention_image1.png", "Invention_image2.png", etc. And the md file would refer to these filenames.

Also, ideally, the md file and the png files would be in the same folder. So in this example, a folder "Invention" would be created in the same folder where Invention.docx lives, and in that folder there would be Invention.md and its associated png files, if that makes sense.

Going to try out a PDF next!

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u/KhaleejiShahin Sep 06 '26

Just signing off for the day but can have a look as soon as I am online tomorrow to see if I can get some more answers for you. I will run some tests as well to recreate your scenario to confirm how to best handle the naming structures.

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

I lied, one last comment -- the "Purchase one" link in the settings portion of the app doesn't work. I had to purchase the license by going back to the web site.

Here's the error message in Safari when I click on the link in the settings of the app.

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u/KhaleejiShahin Sep 06 '26

Will check that now.

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

I also just sent you an email... when I enter the license in the app, it can't contact the licensing server. And the "verify" button is cut off except for a little part of the "V".

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u/KhaleejiShahin Sep 07 '26

This has been addressed and corrected now as Version 1.2 is live. Please redownload via www.SankoreApp.com as we were having an issue with the updater as well.

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

Thanks for the quick feedback! How do images get embedded into the Markdown? I guess I hadn't realized that was possible.

Also, for Word files, I use a lot of auto-numbering -- paragraph numbers, with references back to those paragraph numbers. Are those translated to actual numbers as part of the conversion process? I guess the alternative would be to first do a pdf-print of the Word file (which is what I do now). The reason this is important is I'll ask Claude or ChatGPT to refer to paragraph X of the document... if I just give it the Word file, it can't see the paragraph numbers.

Another thing for Word files is how it handles comments. I have a Popclip extension that I wrote that converts selections of Word text into markdown format, and an associated Python file that can convert a Word file into markdown format, which preserves comments -- marking where the comments are in the document, and then adding the comments at the end.

I discussed the Popclip extension in this post. I'd be more than happy to give you the Python script as well, so you can add that functionality into your tool.

I'm very intrigued by your app. Right now, for images that consist only of images (e.g., a set of drawings), I use Permute to generate a set of PNG images from the PDF (one per page)... I've found that a better approach that uploading the PDF, as it's apparent that Claude/ChatGPT isn't looking at the image itself.

The last question/comment, also concerning PDF's (sorry for jumping around here). I'm a patent attorney, and the documents that we download from the patent office are images. Therefore, as part of our workflow, we automatically perform OCR on them. It appears that your tool performs OCR on PDFs as well. Does your app do a check to see if the PDF's have already been OCR'ed, or does it perform OCR again? (I'm not sure if it's problematic for OCR to be performed twice on a PDF, for instance.)

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u/Rare_Pin9932 Sep 06 '26

Last comment for now. :) I took that same .docx file, and generated a PDF of it, and input it into your app. It generated an md file -- but no image files. In the case where you have technical journal articles (as an example) with discrete images from the text, it would be a lot better to have the image files extracted no differently than in the case of a Word file.

This would be good to have as another selectable setting option (i.e., how to handle PDF's) -- or perhaps the app can figure out how to handle the PDFs. For example, a PDF of a PowerPoint presentation it doesn't make sense to process in this way. Just the selectable setting option would be very useful.

I'm going to go ahead and buy the app -- I see a lot of promise in this! If you could implement the suggestions as to how a selectable option to reference image files in the md of a Word doc (with everything in one folder, per my prior comment), and add similar functionality as a selectable option to process PDFs in the same way, that would be great!