firecrawl/pdf-inspector

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

19647 stars · 1326 forks observed · 2026-10-14

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-19, confidence 0.97

pdf-inspector is a high‑performance Rust library (with Node.js, Python, and WebAssembly bindings) that classifies PDFs and extracts their text with layout awareness. It can also convert PDFs to clean Markdown and optionally route pages to OCR only when needed.

Use cases

• Extract plain text from PDF documents while preserving layout information
• Convert PDF files to clean, position‑aware Markdown
• Detect whether a PDF is text‑based, scanned, image‑based, or mixed
• Route only the scanned pages of a PDF to an OCR engine
• Process PDFs directly in a web browser using WebAssembly
• Integrate fast PDF parsing into Node.js or Python applications
• Analyze multi‑column newspaper‑style PDFs for downstream processing

When to choose

• When you need sub‑200 ms local PDF text extraction without sending data to external services
• When you want accurate PDF type classification to avoid unnecessary OCR
• When you prefer a Rust‑based core for speed and safety
• When you need a single library that works on the server, CLI, and in the browser
• When you require Markdown output with proper headings, lists, tables, and code blocks

When to avoid

• If you need full‑featured PDF editing or creation capabilities
• When you require heavy OCR on every page regardless of content
• If you depend on proprietary PDF features not supported by the parser (e.g., encrypted PDFs)
• When you need a pure JavaScript implementation without native dependencies

Facets

library · maturity active

parser developer-tools data-science rust python wasm cli fast markdown pdf-classification ocr-routing position-aware rust-core webassembly text-extraction nodejs

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="firecrawl/pdf-inspector")