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Usage

Basic usage

Python

In Docling, working with documents is as simple as:

  1. converting your source file to a Docling document
  2. using that Docling document for your workflow

For example, the snippet below shows conversion with export to Markdown:

from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter

source = "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09869"  # file path or URL
converter = DocumentConverter()
doc = converter.convert(source).document

print(doc.export_to_markdown())  # output: "### Docling Technical Report[...]"

Docling supports a wide array of file formats and, as outlined in the architecture guide, provides a versatile document model along with a full suite of supported operations.

CLI

You can additionally use Docling directly from your terminal, for instance:

docling https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.01062

The CLI provides various options, such as 🥚SmolDocling (incl. MLX acceleration) & other VLMs: 

docling --pipeline vlm --vlm-model smoldocling https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.01062

For all available options, run docling --help or check the CLI reference.

What's next

Check out the Usage subpages (navigation menu on the left) as well as our featured examples for additional usage workflows, including conversion customization, RAG, framework integrations, chunking, serialization, enrichments, and much more!