opendataloader-pdf

Deterministic PDF parser for AI pipelines: #1 extraction accuracy (0.907) on its public bench, bounding boxes on every element, 0.015s/page — plus the first open PDF auto-tagging for accessibility.

27,759 2,663 Java Apache-2.0updated yesterday

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Curator's take

Two products in one repo, both rare: a benchmark-topping deterministic parser (Markdown/JSON/HTML with bounding boxes, XY-Cut++ reading order, 0.015s/page, hybrid AI mode when you want it) and the first open-source auto-tagging to Tagged PDF — the accessibility path, built with the PDF Association and validated by veraPDF. Java core with Python/Node SDKs. NOT fully open at the edges: PDF/UA export and the accessibility studio are the enterprise add-on, and Java 11+ is a heavier runtime than the Rust competition. Benchmark caveat: the #1 score is on their own (public, reproducible) bench — verify on your documents.

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README.md

OpenDataLoader PDF

PDF Parser for AI-ready data. Automate PDF accessibility. Open-source.

🔍 PDF parser for AI data extraction — Extract Markdown, JSON (with bounding boxes), and HTML from any PDF. #1 in benchmarks (0.907 overall). Deterministic local mode + AI hybrid mode for complex pages.

How accurate is it? — #1 in benchmarks: 0.907 overall, 0.928 table accuracy across 200 real-world PDFs including multi-column and scientific papers. Deterministic local mode + AI hybrid mode for complex pages (benchmarks)
Scanned PDFs and OCR? — Yes. Built-in OCR (80+ languages) in hybrid mode. Works with poor-quality scans at 300 DPI+ (hybrid mode)
Tables, formulas, images, charts? — Yes. Complex/borderless tables, LaTeX formulas, and AI-generated picture/chart descriptions all via hybrid mode (hybrid mode)
How do I use this for RAG? — pip install opendataloader-pdf, convert in 3 lines. Outputs structured Markdown for chunking, JSON with bounding boxes for source citations, and HTML. LangChain integration available. Python, Node.js, Java SDKs (quick start | LangChain)

♿ PDF accessibility automation — Auto-tag untagged PDFs into screen-reader-ready Tagged PDFs at scale. First open-source tool to generate Tagged PDFs end-to-end.

What's the problem? — Accessibility regulations are now enforced worldwide. Manual PDF remediation costs $50–200 per document and doesn't scale (regulations)
What's free? — Layout analysis + auto-tagging (Apache 2.0). Untagged PDF in → Tagged PDF out. No proprietary SDK dependency (auto-tagging)
**What about PDF/

Continue your stack

What teams reach for next — and why each earns a place beside opendataloader-pdf. Ranked by curator confidence.

Alternative to See all + compare →

MinerU

Heavyweight document-to-markdown/JSON parser — PDFs plus Office (docx/pptx/xlsx) through layout analysis and OCR into LLM-ready output for RAG and agentic pipelines. 73k stars, self-hostable.

Why it fitsSame heavyweight PDF-to-structured-data slot: MinerU throws ML layout analysis and OCR at everything; OpenDataLoader is deterministic-first with an optional hybrid AI mode — and beats it on extraction accuracy in its published bench at a fraction of the compute.

pdf-inspector

Firecrawl's Rust PDF triage: classifies text-based vs scanned in ~10-50ms, extracts positioned text and clean Markdown without OCR — routing the ~54% of PDFs that never needed a model.

Why it fitsKindred no-ML philosophy, different depth — pdf-inspector triages and extracts in 200ms; OpenDataLoader does full layout analysis with bounding boxes. Notably, pdf-inspector benchmarks itself on opendataloader-bench: same yardstick, acknowledged rivalry.