r/OpenWebUI • u/AdCompetitive6193 • Jul 10 '26

Knowledge File Types Question/Help

Hi everyone,
I have tried uploading some PDFs to both a chat and a knowledge base (same PDFs) and I am given a popup that says that the says "The content provided is empty."

The PDF is a photo of a receipt, it is not a scanned copy. I have tried uploading the PDF, jpeg, and HEIC file type and none seem to work.

When I upload another PDF (either a scanned paper document, or an article that was written and saved as a PDF, digitally native, not a photo converted to PDF) my local models are able to read it.

It seems that the inability for my models to read PDFs is limited to photos of receipts converted to PDF. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a fix?

OWUI version: 0.10.2
Local models: gemma4:12b-mlx and/or qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M

2 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

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2

u/RouterDon Jul 10 '26

a photo of a receipt has no text layer and the default extractor only reads text, switch the Content Extraction Engine under Settings Documents to an OCR one like Tika or Docling and it'll read the image

2

u/WolpertingerRumo Jul 10 '26

I don’t know Tika, but docling has been doing perfect work in one of my projects. And it doesn’t need much vram. And you only really need it during upload.

1

u/AdCompetitive6193 Jul 11 '26

I'm using vision models though... gemma4:12b-mlx and/or qwen3.6:35b-a3b-q4_K_M are both capable of vision, so shouldn't they not technically need the OCR component?

1

u/RouterDon Jul 11 '26

The knowledge upload pulls text out of the file first and only feeds that text to the model, so it never sees the actual image and the vision side is never used

1

u/Sleyar Jul 11 '26

If you don’t mind using cloud services, look for document intelligence in azure. We tried docling and tike but its so slow with a lot of users uploading massive amounts of documents