FAQ & Known Limitations
How do updates work?
Pourdown checks GitHub Releases for a newer version automatically on launch (silently — you're only notified if one's actually available) and you can trigger a check any time from Help → Check for Updates…. Accepting an update downloads and installs it in the background, then restarts the app. Turn the automatic check off in Preferences → General if you'd rather update manually via the releases page.
Is import a round-trip converter?
No. File → Import converts a source document into Markdown, one-way. Exporting back to the original format (or to HTML/PDF) will not reconstruct the exact original layout — Markdown is a simpler format by design, and Pourdown's value is in getting content into an editable, version-controllable form, not in perfectly mirroring Office/PDF layout back out.
Why is xlsx import capped at 500 rows per sheet?
This is a deliberate, documented limit, not a bug — very large sheets produce Markdown tables that are unwieldy to hand-edit anyway. An inline note is added when rows are omitted so you know data was truncated.
Why didn't my PDF table convert correctly?
PDF table detection uses conservative geometry clustering — it requires at least two aligned columns across at least three consecutive rows before it will treat something as a table, specifically to avoid misreading incidental alignment (like a Name: / Role: pair) as tabular data. If a table cell's wrapped content is itself an indented or bulleted list, it falls outside that alignment tolerance and the affected row renders as plain prose instead of a corrupted table. This is a considered trade-off favoring "definitely correct prose" over "maybe-correct but silently wrong table."
Why can't I see some images from my Word/PowerPoint/PDF file?
Vector image formats (EMF/WMF), which are common in Office exports, can't be rendered by the app's embedded webview. Pourdown replaces them with an *(unsupported image)* note rather than showing a broken image link.
What happened to pptx animations?
They're dropped on import — Markdown has no way to represent animation, so there's nothing to convert them to.
Does Pourdown use any code from MarkItDown?
No. The idea of converting documents into clean, LLM-friendly Markdown was popularized by Microsoft's MarkItDown, and Pourdown's import feature was inspired by that concept — but Pourdown is an independent reimplementation written in Rust, using an entirely different set of libraries. It is not a port and not a fork. Both projects are MIT-licensed. See markdown-import.md for the full comparison.
I found a bug / have a feature idea — where do I report it?
Please use the issue templates on GitHub. If it's about one of the limitations above, it helps to mention that you've read this page — we may want to discuss the trade-off before changing it. See CONTRIBUTING.md if you'd like to submit a fix yourself.