How to parse lots of PDFs and more into markdown, with Laravel

Short summary

A hands-on tutorial for building an end-to-end document Q&A pipeline in Laravel 13: upload, parse to Markdown, chunk, embed into pgvector, and query with an AI agent. Covers schema design, model setup, async parsing, and chunking logic with real code. The author discloses their product Parse for Artisans as the parsing layer but notes a free open-source alternative (spatie/pdf-to-text) for digital PDFs.

• •End-to-end Laravel 13 RAG pipeline: upload, parse, chunk, embed, query using pgvector
• •Parse for Artisans handles scanned PDFs, .doc, and emails; spatie/pdf-to-text is the free alternative for digital PDFs
• •No separate vector database needed — Postgres with pgvector handles embeddings and search

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.