distillPDF¶

Turn any PDF into clean, LLM-ready HTML or Markdown — structure-aware, pure-Rust, MIT-licensed. distillPDF reconstructs a document's structure and emits semantic output a model can read directly, with no styling noise and no system dependencies.

What it is¶

distillpdf reads a PDF and reconstructs its structure — reading order, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and figures — then emits compact, semantic HTML or Markdown (or plain text) ready to feed to an LLM or a RAG pipeline. Markdown is produced from the same HTML the HTML renderer emits, so both formats benefit from every extraction improvement.

It is built on lopdf and shipped to Python via PyO3 and maturin as a small, self-contained wheel: a lightweight, permissively licensed alternative to AGPL or heavyweight extractors (PyMuPDF, pdfminer, Unstructured), with no system dependencies and no Python runtime dependencies.

Why it exists¶

Structure, not just text. Two-column reading order, multi-level table headers mapped onto a single grid (colspan), vector figures transcoded to inline SVG, an auto-generated table of contents, and named section extraction (doc.section("methods")).
LLM-ready output. Lean, class-free HTML — semantic markup with anchor ids so table-of- contents entries link straight into the document.
Small and permissive. Pure Rust on lopdf, MIT-licensed, no system dependencies, no Python runtime dependencies. It drops into any pipeline without license headaches.
Fast. Native Rust extraction with a release build tuned for speed (LTO, single codegen unit).

Features¶

Feature	What it does
Rendering HTML & Markdown	`to_html()` / `to_markdown()` with section- or page-first structure, image modes, and an optional table of contents.
Raw extraction	`extract_tables()`, `extract_images()`, `extract_links()`, `extract_fonts()` — the structured pieces, not rendered output.
The .dpdf document model	`distill()` persists the analysis to a durable file you can re-render and query forever, with no source PDF.
Searching documents	Coverage-honest lexical `find()` and opt-in semantic `search()` over a `.dpdf`.
OCR for scanned PDFs	A bundled offline fast tier (Tesseract) and an optional accurate VLM tier (granite-docling), folded into the same HTML / Markdown / searchable-PDF outputs.
Command line	The `distillpdf` CLI — convert, distill, search, and OCR without writing Python.

Install¶

pip install distillpdf

Prebuilt wheels; no compiler or system libraries required. Installing also puts a distillpdf command on your PATH.

30-second example¶

import distillpdf

doc = distillpdf.open("paper.pdf")        # or distillpdf.from_bytes(data)

doc.to_html()                             # writes paper.html (one self-contained file)
doc.to_markdown()                         # writes paper.md + an img/ folder of figures

html = doc.to_html(return_string=True)    # ...or get the rendered string back instead

By default these methods write a file (deriving the name from the PDF) and return 1; pass return_string=True to get the rendered text back and write nothing. See Rendering HTML & Markdown for modes, image handling, and targeted section extraction.

Comparison¶

	distillPDF	PyMuPDF	pdfminer.six	Unstructured
License	MIT	AGPL / commercial	MIT	Apache (heavy deps)
Structure-aware HTML	yes	partial	no	yes
System deps	none	none	none	many
Implementation	Rust	C	Python	Python

Scope¶

In scope: text, table, image, and font extraction; an HTML / Markdown output layer for RAG and LLM ingestion; and optional OCR for scanned pages with a searchable-PDF writer.

Out of scope (for now): page rendering.

Early release, testers wanted¶

Early release — the API is small and may still change

This is a young project. If you have PDFs that come out wrong, please open an issue with the file (or a description) — real-world documents are exactly what this needs to get better. The .dpdf document model is also experimental (schema_version 0) and not yet a stable contract; see the .dpdf format reference and the design notes.

distillPDF is MIT-licensed — use it anywhere, including commercial and closed-source projects. The source lives at github.com/kkollsga/distillpdf; see Contributing and development to build from source or run the tests. New here? Start with Getting started.