Docling

Docling is an open-source document-conversion toolkit originally built and released by IBM Research to solve a specific problem: turning messy real-world documents — PDFs, Word files, PowerPoint decks, scanned manuals — into structured JSON or Markdown that large language models and RAG pipelines can actually use. Unlike traditional OCR, Docling understands document layout and structure using two specialized AI models it ships with: DocLayNet for layout analysis and TableFormer for table structure recognition, so tables, headings, and reading order survive the conversion instead of collapsing into a wall of unstructured text. It's designed to run efficiently on commodity hardware within a small resource budget rather than requiring GPU infrastructure. Since being open-sourced, the project has crossed 37,000+ GitHub stars and logged over 100 releases, and is now maintained under the community-facing docling-project GitHub organization with IBM's continued backing.