Comparison with Markdown-based pipelines and efficiency vs text-only RAG

Hi! I came across PixelRAG and shared it with the Digital Escape Tools community:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalEscapeTools/s/jT9TryU3FX

One of our community members, who mentioned they're a researcher, raised some interesting questions that I thought were worth forwarding here.

They asked:

Have you compared PixelRAG against a Markdown-based workflow instead of HTML-to-plain-text?

Since Markdown preserves document structure (headings, lists, tables) while reducing token usage, could the reported accuracy gains partly reflect the text baseline rather than a limitation of text representations?

Have you considered comparisons using Markdown generated by tools such as Microsoft MarkItDown, get-md, or Pandoc?

Do you have benchmarks comparing token usage, inference cost, and overall efficiency between a text-only embedding/RAG pipeline and PixelRAG's vision-based pipeline?

These seem like valuable comparisons for understanding the trade-offs between a "render everything as pixels" approach and a "well-structured text" approach.

I'm not the original author of these questions, I'm simply forwarding them on behalf of a community member who was interested in the project. If helpful, the original Reddit discussion is linked above.

Thanks for your work!