pdf-reader

Turn a PDF into clean, position-aware Markdown that an AI model can read without misreading the layout. Backed by pdf-inspector (Firecrawl's Rust engine), which handles columns, tables, headings, lists, and code blocks, and tells you exactly which pages (if any) need OCR.

When to use

• The user shares or points at a PDF and asks you to read, summarize, extract, or quote from it — and your model cannot read PDFs natively.
• The PDF contains tables, multi-column layouts, or dense formatting where a naive text dump would corrupt the meaning.
• You need to cite specific pages of a document.

Do NOT use for image-only/scanned PDFs expecting embedded text: pdf-inspector is not an OCR engine. It will classify them as scanned/image_based and flag every page — that is the signal to route to OCR (--ocr-cmd) instead.