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Using the Docling agent skill

Agent Skills are folders of instructions that AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, etc.) can load when relevant.

Where this bundle lives

  • Cursor (local): ~/.cursor/skills/docling-document-intelligence/ (or copy this folder there).
  • Docling repository (docs + PRs): docs/examples/agent_skill/docling-document-intelligence/ in github.com/docling-project/docling.

The two trees are kept in sync; use either source.

Install (copy into your agent's skills directory)

# From a checkout of the Docling repo
cp -r docs/examples/agent_skill/docling-document-intelligence ~/.cursor/skills/

# Or copy from another machine / archive into e.g. ~/.claude/skills/

No extra config is required beyond installing Python dependencies (below).

Usage

Open your agent-enabled IDE and ask, for example:

Parse report.pdf and give me a structural outline

Convert https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09869 to markdown

Chunk invoice.pdf for RAG ingestion with 512 token chunks

Process scanned.pdf using the VLM pipeline

The agent should read SKILL.md, match the task, and run the appropriate docling CLI command or Python API call.

Running the docling CLI directly

pip install docling docling-core

# Basic conversion to Markdown
docling report.pdf --output /tmp/

# JSON output
docling report.pdf --to json --output /tmp/

# Custom OCR engine
docling report.pdf --ocr-engine rapidocr --output /tmp/

# VLM pipeline
docling scanned.pdf --pipeline vlm --output /tmp/

# VLM with specific model
docling scanned.pdf --pipeline vlm --vlm-model granite_docling --output /tmp/

# Remote VLM services
docling doc.pdf --pipeline vlm --enable-remote-services --output /tmp/

Evaluate and refine

docling report.pdf --to json --output /tmp/
docling report.pdf --to md --output /tmp/
python3 scripts/docling-evaluate.py /tmp/report.json --markdown /tmp/report.md

If the report shows warn or fail, follow recommended_actions, re-convert with docling using the suggested flags, and optionally append a note to improvement-log.md (see SKILL.md section 7).

What the skill covers

Task How to ask
Parse PDF / DOCX / PPTX / HTML / image "parse this file"
Convert to Markdown "convert to markdown"
Export as structured JSON "export as JSON"
Chunk for RAG "chunk for RAG", "prepare for ingestion"
Analyze structure "show me the headings and tables"
Use VLM pipeline "use the VLM pipeline", "process scanned PDF"
Use remote inference "use vLLM", "call the API pipeline"

Further reading