pdf-inspector: Fast PDF Classification and Text Extraction in Rust

Repositoryfirecrawl/pdf-inspectorTool

Firecrawl's pdf-inspector is a high-performance Rust library designed to inspect PDFs, classify scanned versus text-based documents, and extract text into clean Markdown.

Key points

  1. Classifies documents as text-based, scanned, image-based, or mixed within 10 to 50 ms, providing confidence scores and page-level routing.
  2. Extracts position-aware text with coordinates, font details, rotation handling, and automatic multi-column reading order.
  3. Converts PDF content into clean Markdown without OCR, supporting dual-mode table detection, headings, lists, and code blocks.
  4. Supports selective local OCR via PP-OCRv6 Small using PDFium and ONNX Runtime only for pages that genuinely require it.
  5. Provides bindings for Rust, CLI, Python, Node.js, and browser-based WebAssembly environments without server round trips.

Why it matters

Many ingestion pipelines routinely route every PDF document through slow and costly OCR services. Because roughly 54 percent of PDFs contain digital text, pre-filtering and extracting text locally in under 200 ms dramatically cuts latency and compute costs.

Analysis

The project tackles a key bottleneck in data and LLM ingestion workflows by decoupling native text parsing from optical character recognition. The single-document-load design in Rust ensures low memory usage and high throughput. By supporting WebAssembly and selective on-demand OCR fallback, it suits both client-side and high-volume backend environments. With almost 19,000 GitHub stars, comprehensive package bindings, and an MIT license, the library displays significant maturity for production adoption.

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Summary generated by AI (Gemini 3.8 Flash, 27 September 2026). It may contain errors – the original source is authoritative.

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