Simon Willison’s Weblog

3rd November 2024 - Link Blog

Docling. MIT licensed document extraction Python library from the Deep Search team at IBM, who released Docling v2 on October 16th.

Here's the Docling Technical Report paper from August, which provides details of two custom models: a layout analysis model for figuring out the structure of the document (sections, figures, text, tables etc) and a TableFormer model specifically for extracting structured data from tables.

Those models are available on Hugging Face.

Here's how to try out the Docling CLI interface using uvx (avoiding the need to install it first - though since it downloads models it will take a while to run the first time):

uvx docling mydoc.pdf --to json --to md

This will output a mydoc.json file with complex layout information and a mydoc.md Markdown file which includes Markdown tables where appropriate.

The Python API is a lot more comprehensive. It can even extract tables as Pandas DataFrames:

from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter
converter = DocumentConverter()
result = converter.convert("document.pdf")
for table in result.document.tables:
    df = table.export_to_dataframe()
    print(df)

I ran that inside uv run --with docling python. It took a little while to run, but it demonstrated that the library works.