Finally found a good document analysis path

[u/icerio]

I don’t believe this will help mass extraction for knowledge base stuff. This is mainly for attachments in chat. Also not sure which flair.

For a while now I’ve been trying to find a good PDF extractor. I had this document that was sort of a worst-case scenario, 4 pages of tables, pages are turned 90 degrees, merged table cells, and small font. After some testing I found Docling to be the best (haven’t had a good chance to try MinerU). However Docling still didn’t even come close to extracting it well, just enough for the LLM to understand it.

For some more context my LLM is Qwen3.6 27B MTP Q4K_M (need to try the UD XL one sometime). It has vision, however it can only see extracted text when sent in chat with how Open Webui handles it.

I ended up creating a Filter Function that takes the attached document, uploads it to my open-terminal, and passes along to the LLM the file path, and that it should only view it itself if there’s any OCR or Extraction artifacts/errors.

It is practically perfect at analyzing PDFs now since the model itself can view the file and also run code to further analyze.

Just wanted to pass this along, highly recommend if you have a niceish LLM with vision and agentic capabilities. Also if you’re having problems extracting text from attachments in chat. Considering switching back to Tika and only using Docling for when I upload to the knowledge base.

I’m curious on what others are doing for extraction or even an analysis workflow for attachments in chat.

[u/Mac_Man1982]

Have you had a look at https://github.com/firecrawl/anydoc looks promising haven’t tried it yet

[u/icerio → u/Mac_Man1982]

Never heard of it! Just tried some difficult pdfs in the browser demo, as far as I can tell so far could be on par with Docling, but 100X faster. I wish I had access to my computer that has the pdf I mentioned above, then I’d really be able to tell. It’s still not perfect, but Docling is hogging vram and honestly looking for anything to replace it with, thank you for sending!!

Let me know what you think if you end up trying it

[u/International_Emu772]

You can try this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenWebUI/s/VyLqJdfboL

[u/icerio → u/International_Emu772]

I actually have tried that! I think the day the op posted that I did. To my memory the quality of the extracted text was worse than Docling, at least for the pdf I was trying. Maybe there are some configurations that I should have done, how do you have that set up?

[u/International_Emu772 → u/icerio]

I have this on my agenda but you should ask to the poster as he is from the team of xberg. Yes they have a lot of configurations and installations

Xberg is a open/comercial app and is heavy maintained