-o flag doesn't work

[kristofmulier]

My system:

• Windows 11
• Python 3.13

I attempted to use markitdown like this at first:

>markitdown user_manual.pdf > user_manual.md

But that leads to a Unicode error:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u3001' in position 32198: character maps to <undefined>

The root cause is that Windows is trying to print text with characters (like \u3001) that don’t exist in the default code page cp1252. In other words, Markitdown is generating Unicode output, but printing it directly to the console fails on Windows when the console doesn’t support that character.

To mitigate this problem, I now try this:

>markitdown user_manual.pdf -o user_manual.md

Which results in:

markitdown: error: unrecognized arguments: -o user_manual.md

How can it not recognize the -o flag? The homepage of markitdown shows the -o flag as a valid input flag for the tool.

[kristofmulier]

My current workaround is:

>chcp 65001
Active code page: 65001

>set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8

>markitdown user_manual.pdf > user_manual.md