Turn any PDF into clean Markdown with a self-hosted Docling API

Short summary

Docling is IBM's open-source document parser that converts PDFs, DOCX, PPTX, and images into clean Markdown or JSON with proper table structure and reading order. It ships with a FastAPI serving mode so you can self-host a REST API for LLM pipelines without cloud OCR bills or rate limits. The author provides a one-click Railway template and notes the layout models need ~2GB RAM to avoid OOM kills on large documents.

• •Docling converts PDFs and other docs to clean Markdown/JSON with layout-aware parsing
• •Self-host via Docker or Railway; exposes a simple REST API at /v1/convert/file
• •Needs ~2GB RAM for layout models; ideal for RAG and LLM ingestion pipelines

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