pdf-inspector

Overview

A high-performance Rust library that detects whether PDFs are text-based or scanned, extracts positioned text, and converts it to clean Markdown without OCR. Includes Python, Node.js, and WebAssembly bindings, plus CLI tools. Designed for smart routing to skip OCR for the majority of native-text PDFs.

README Preview

# pdf-inspector\n\n[](https://crates.io/crates/pdf-inspector)\n[](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@firecrawl/pdf-inspector)\n[](https://pypi.org/project/pdf-inspector/)\n[](LICENSE)\n\nFast Rust library for PDF classification and text extraction. Detects whether a PDF is text-based or scanned, extracts text with position awareness, and converts to clean Markdown — all without OCR. Includes bindings for [Python](docs/python.md), [Node.js](napi/README.md), and [browser WebAssembly](wasm/README.md).\n\nBuilt by [Firecrawl](https://firecrawl.dev) to handle text-based PDFs locally in under 200ms, skipping expensive OCR services for the ~54% of PDFs that don't need them.\n\n## Features\n\n- **Smart classification** — Detect TextBased, Scanned, ImageBased, or Mixed PDFs in ~10-50ms by sampling content streams. Returns a confidence score (0.0-1.0) and per-page OCR routing.\n- **Text extraction** — Position-aware extraction with font info, X/Y coordinates, and automatic multi-column reading order.\n- **Markdown conversion** — Headings (H1-H4 via font size ratios), bullet/numbered/letter lists, code blocks (monospace font detection), tables (rectangle-based and heuristic), bold/italic formatting, URL linking, and page breaks.\n- **Table detection** — Dual-mode: rectangle-based detection from PDF drawing ops, plus heuristic detection from text alignment. Handles financial tables, footnotes, and continuation tables across pages.\n- **CID font support** — ToUnicode CMap decoding for Type0/Identity-H fonts, UTF-16BE, UTF-8, and Latin-1 encodings.\n- **Multi-column layout** — Automatic detection of newspaper-style columns, sequential reading order, and RTL text support.\n- **Encoding issue detection** — Automatically flags broken font encodings so callers can fall back to OCR.\n- **Single document load** — The document is parsed once and shared between detection and extraction, avoiding redundant I/O.\n- **Browser WebAssembly** — Run the same Rust parser locally in browsers and Web