pdf-inspector

pdf-inspector

Fast Rust library for PDF classification and text extraction. By default it detects whether a PDF is text-based or scanned, extracts text with position awareness, and converts to clean Markdown without OCR. Native Rust and CLI consumers can opt into selective OCR. Includes bindings for Python, Node.js, and browser WebAssembly.

Built by Firecrawl to handle text-based PDFs locally in under 200ms, skipping expensive OCR services for the ~54% of PDFs that don't need them.

Features

• Smart classification — Detect TextBased, Scanned, ImageBased, or Mixed PDFs in ~10-50ms by sampling content streams. Returns a confidence score (0.0-1.0) and per-page OCR routing.
• Text extraction — Position-aware extraction with font info, X/Y coordinates, and automatic multi-column reading order. Rotated runs (margin stamps, chart axis titles) keep a true axis-aligned box and report their rotation angle instead of collapsing to zero width.
• Markdown conversion — Headings (H1-H4 via font size ratios), bullet/numbered/letter lists, code blocks (monospace font detection), tables (rectangle-based and heuristic), bold/italic formatting, URL linking, and page breaks.
• Table detection — Dual-mode: rectangle-based detection from PDF drawing ops, plus heuristic detection from text alignment. Handles financial tables, footnotes, and continuation tables across pages.
• CID font support — ToUnicode CMap decoding for Type0/Identity-H fonts, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, and Latin-1 encodings.
• Multi-column layout — Automatic detection of newspaper-style columns, sequential reading order, and RTL text support.
• Encoding issue detection — Automatically flags broken font encodings so callers can fall back to OCR.
• Selective OCR — Rust, CLI, Python, and Node can render only pages that need OCR, run PP-OCRv6 Small locally, and preserve per-page provenance and hosted-fallback recommendations.
• Single document load — The document is parsed once and shared between detection and extraction, avoiding redundant I/O.
• Browser WebAssembly — Run the same Rust parser locally in browsers and Web Workers, with embedded CMaps and no server round trip.
• Lightweight by default — The default Rust and browser builds remain pure extraction. Native Python and Node packages include the OCR integration, but PDFium, ONNX Runtime, and model files remain external and are touched only when a page is routed to OCR.

Benchmark

Evaluated on the opendataloader-bench corpus (200 PDFs). Only local engines without model-based PDF parsing are shown; OCR was disabled. Scores are 0-1, higher is better.

Results were refreshed on July 31, 2026, on an Apple M4 Pro. Engine versions were pdf-inspector 0.2.6, LiteParse 2.10.1, OpenDataLoader 2.2.1, PyMuPDF4LLM 0.2.0, and MarkItDown 0.1.5. Speed is the median of five alternating or rotating complete corpus runs after an excluded warm-up run, with each parser processing documents sequentially in a single process.

The complete parser configuration, per-document predictions, evaluator output, and generated charts are available in the reproducible results branch.

Best fit: Native-text PDFs where speed, reading order, and table structure matter. In this comparison, pdf-inspector delivered the higher overall, reading-order, and table scores, along with the fastest complete run. That makes it a strong local default for reports, research papers, financial documents, invoices, and legal PDFs that need clean, structured Markdown without adding OCR latency or infrastructure.

Use the paired benchmark harness to compare two local builds against the exact same corpus and evaluator revision.

Quick start

Python

pip install pdf-inspector

import pdf_inspector

result = pdf_inspector.process_pdf("document.pdf")
print(result.pdf_type)   # "text_based", "scanned", "image_based", "mixed"
print(result.markdown)   # Markdown string or None

# Selective OCR; clean text PDFs do not load the external OCR runtime.
ocr = pdf_inspector.process_pdf_with_ocr("document.pdf")
print(ocr.pages_routed_to_ocr)

Full API reference: docs/python.md

Node.js

npm install @firecrawl/pdf-inspector

import { readFileSync } from 'fs';
import { processPdf, processPdfWithOcr } from '@firecrawl/pdf-inspector';

const pdf = readFileSync('document.pdf');
const result = processPdf(pdf);
console.log(result.pdfType);   // "TextBased", "Scanned", "ImageBased", "Mixed"
console.log(result.markdown);  // Markdown string or null

const ocr = await processPdfWithOcr(pdf); // selective OCR, off the event loop
console.log(ocr.pagesRoutedToOcr);

Full API reference: napi/README.md

Browser WebAssembly

npm install @firecrawl/pdf-inspector-wasm

import init, { processPdf } from '@firecrawl/pdf-inspector-wasm';

await init();
const response = await fetch('/document.pdf');
const pdf = new Uint8Array(await response.arrayBuffer());
const result = processPdf(pdf);

console.log(result.pdfType);
console.log(result.markdown);

Full API reference: wasm/README.md

Rust

Install from crates.io:

cargo add pdf-inspector

Or add it manually:

[dependencies]
pdf-inspector = "1"

use pdf_inspector::process_pdf;

let result = process_pdf("document.pdf")?;
println!("Type: {:?}", result.pdf_type);
if let Some(markdown) = &result.markdown {
    println!("{}", markdown);
}

Full API reference: docs/rust-api.md

CLI

…

Rust and CLI consumers opt into OCR at build time:

cargo install pdf-inspector --features ocr --bin pdf2md
PDFIUM_LIB_PATH=/path/to/libpdfium ORT_DYLIB_PATH=/path/to/libonnxruntime \
  pdf2md scan.pdf --ocr auto --json

The OCR JSON envelope is versioned and reports routed pages, per-page source and confidence, warnings, and pages recommended for the hosted document pipeline. Native Python and Node packages expose the same pipeline without a source-build feature. All native entry points still require separately installed PDFium and ONNX Runtime libraries only when OCR is routed. See the OCR runtime setup guide for pinned downloads, platform support, model-cache behavior, and hosted-fallback integration. See the Rust API guide for lower-level controls.

From a source checkout, use cargo run --bin pdf2md -- document.pdf or cargo run --bin detect-pdf -- document.pdf instead.

Architecture

…

The document is loaded once via load_document_from_path / load_document_from_mem and shared between the detection and extraction stages, so there's no redundant parsing.

Project structure

…

How classification works

1. Parse the xref table and page tree (no full object load)
2. Select pages based on ScanStrategy (default: all pages with early exit)
3. Look for Tj/TJ (text operators) and Do (image operators) in content streams
4. Classify based on text operator presence across sampled pages

This detects 300+ page PDFs in milliseconds. The result includes pages_needing_ocr — a list of specific page numbers that lack text, enabling per-page OCR routing instead of all-or-nothing.

Scan strategies

Markdown output

The converter handles:

Use case: smart PDF routing

pdf-inspector was built for pipelines that process PDFs at scale. Instead of sending every PDF through OCR:

PDF arrives
  → pdf-inspector classifies it (~20ms)
  → TextBased + high confidence?
      YES → extract locally (~150ms), done
      NO  → send to OCR service (2-10s)

This saves cost and latency for the majority of PDFs that are already text-based (reports, papers, invoices, legal docs).

Debugging

See docs/debugging.md for RUST_LOG environment variable usage.

License

MIT