TL;DR
Firecrawl has developed a fast Rust library for PDF classification and text extraction that operates without OCR, achieving results in under 200ms. It effectively identifies PDF types and extracts text with formatting, converting it to clean Markdown.
✦ Why It Matters
Start using this library to efficiently process text-based PDFs without relying on OCR services.
Key Takeaways
How It Works
Pdf-inspector classifies PDFs by sampling content streams to detect text presence, allowing it to quickly determine if a PDF is text-based or requires OCR. It extracts text while preserving layout and formatting, including multi-column structures and tables, and converts the output into Markdown format.
This is achieved through a single document load, which enhances efficiency by sharing the parsed data between classification and extraction stages.