Docling - Document & Web Content Extraction

CLI tool for parsing documents and web pages into clean, structured text. Uses GPU acceleration for OCR and ML models.

Prerequisites

• docling CLI must be installed (e.g., via pipx install docling)
• For GPU support: NVIDIA GPU with CUDA drivers

When to Use

• Extract content from a URL → Use docling (not web_fetch)
• Search for information → Use web_search (Brave)
• Parse PDFs, DOCX, PPTX → Use docling
• OCR on images → Use docling

Quick Commands

Web Page → Markdown (default)

docling "<URL>" --from html --to md

Web Page → Plain Text

docling "<URL>" --from html --to text --output /tmp/docling_out

PDF with OCR

docling "/path/to/file.pdf" --ocr --device cuda --output /tmp/docling_out

Key Options

Security Notes

⚠️ Avoid these flags unless you trust the source:

• --enable-remote-services - can send data to remote endpoints
• --allow-external-plugins - loads third-party code
• Custom --headers with untrusted values - can redirect requests

Workflow

• For web content extraction: Use docling "" --from html --to text --output /tmp/docling_out
• Read the output file from the specified output directory
• Clean up the output directory after reading

GPU Support

Docling supports GPU acceleration via CUDA (NVIDIA). Verify CUDA is available:

python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())"

Full CLI Reference

See references/cli-reference.md for complete option list.