Docling

Docling converts documents — PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, CSV, images, audio, and XML — into a single unified representation, the DoclingDocument, which you can export as Markdown (human-readable) or JSON (structured, lossless). Reach for Docling whenever you need to understand the content of a file you cannot read directly, especially PDFs (including scanned ones, via OCR or a vision-language model).

The fastest thing that works: the CLI

If you just need to read a document's content, run the CLI. It is installed with the docling package and accepts a local path or a URL:

docling report.pdf --to md --output /tmp/        # → /tmp/report.md
docling https://example.com/paper.pdf --to json --output /tmp/