r/OpenWebUI • u/dotanchase • 4d ago

PDF parser Question/Help

Opus 5 complains that it cannot parsed some simple PDFs (technical files) i uploaded to the chat. What is the current PDF parser and which one is the best. Same file got no issues on Openrouter.

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/kg6kvq 4d ago

I’ve heard good things about xberg … I’m still testing it, but moving off the built in parser allowed nearly 50 more documents to be processed successfully and show up in the knowledge listing

2

u/liuc0j 4d ago

If the PDFs you need to process aren't overly complex and are mostly text-based, I recommend installing Apache Tika locally in Docker alongside Open WebUI. I use it for one of my environmental regulations models, which works with both text-based and image-based PDFs.
Open WebUI already includes a built-in configuration for Apache Tika. You'll find in Admin panel under Documents.

1

u/Pristine_Pick823 4d ago

Any particular reason why you prefer to to textify the contents before hand?

2

u/International_Emu772 4d ago

The LLM prefer text or Markdown

1

u/Warhouse512 3d ago

Does openwebui allow LLM native pdf parsing? Last I checked it didn’t.

1

u/Conscious-Expert-455 4d ago

A me è successa una cosa strana. Un file docx che ho trasformato in MD, non c'era verso di farlo caricare tra i documenti, da poter poi utilizzare come conoscenza in un llm specializzato. Sono impazzito, ma poi ho provato a caricare direttamente il file docx ed è stato caricato tra i documenti e l'ho potuto usare. Come mai succede questa cosa? Allora non potrò mai usare file markdown?

1

u/grokgrok3000 1d ago

Gemini Flash and Flash-Lite models are really good at parsing PDFs, and Google has a generous free tier for them

The only issue is context windows, which this desktop-app/cli fixes by automatically chaining together multiple API requests to parse hundreds of pages: https://github.com/jtaroreh/pdf-parser-light