distillpdf 0.0.18

Pure-Rust PDF extraction that distills documents into clean, LLM-ready HTML — for LLMs and RAG, built on lopdf

distillPDF

Turn any PDF into clean, LLM-ready HTML or Markdown — structure-aware, pure-Rust, MIT-licensed.

distillpdf reads a PDF and reconstructs its structure — reading order, headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and figures — then emits compact, semantic HTML or Markdown (or plain text) ready to feed to an LLM or a RAG pipeline. No styling noise, no layout junk: just the content a model needs. Markdown is produced from the same HTML, so both formats benefit from every extraction improvement.

It's built on lopdf and shipped to Python via PyO3 + maturin as a small, self-contained wheel — a lightweight, permissively licensed alternative to AGPL/heavyweight extractors (PyMuPDF, pdfminer, Unstructured), with no system dependencies and no Python runtime deps.

🧪 Early release (0.0.3) — testers wanted. The API is small and may still change. If you have PDFs that come out wrong, please open an issue with the file (or a description) — real-world documents are exactly what this needs to get better.

Install

pip install distillpdf

Prebuilt wheels; no compiler or system libraries required. Installing also puts a distillpdf command on your PATH.

Command line

Convert a PDF to clean HTML or Markdown in one command:

distillpdf paper.pdf                  # HTML to stdout
distillpdf paper.pdf -o paper.html    # ...or to an HTML file
distillpdf paper.pdf -o paper.md      # ...or Markdown (inferred from the .md extension)
distillpdf paper.pdf --markdown       # Markdown to stdout
distillpdf *.pdf -o out/              # batch: out/<name>.html per input

distillpdf paper.pdf -o p.html --image-mode external  # lean HTML + an img/ folder
distillpdf paper.pdf --image-mode drop           # replace images with placeholder text

distillpdf paper.pdf --mode page      # page-first HTML (default is section-first)
distillpdf paper.pdf --no-toc         # omit the table-of-contents nav
distillpdf paper.pdf --text           # plain text instead of HTML
distillpdf paper.pdf --toc            # print the table of contents
distillpdf paper.pdf --section abstract

(Also available as python -m distillpdf.)

Quickstart

import distillpdf

doc = distillpdf.open("paper.pdf")        # or distillpdf.from_bytes(data)

# By default, these WRITE a file and return 1 (deriving the name from the PDF):
doc.to_html()                             # → paper.html  (one self-contained file)
doc.to_markdown()                         # → paper.md  + an img/ folder of figures
doc.to_html("out.html")                   # ...or to a specific path / directory
doc.to_html("out.html", image_mode="external")  # ...lean HTML + an img/ folder

# Pass return_string=True to get the rendered text back instead of writing:
html = doc.to_html(return_string=True)    # self-contained HTML string (inline images)
md   = doc.to_markdown(return_string=True) # ...or Markdown (built from the same HTML)

# rendering options work the same on both:
doc.to_html(mode="page", toc=False)
text     = doc.extract_text()             # plain text, in reading order
toc      = doc.toc()                      # [(level, title, page, anchor_id), ...]
abstract = doc.section("abstract")        # targeted section extraction (returns a string)

Markdown

to_markdown() is a transform of the very HTML to_html() produces — so every processor improvement (clipping, heading detection, tables, front-matter) flows into Markdown automatically, with no second renderer to keep in sync.

doc.to_markdown()                                  # string (images embedded inline)
doc.to_markdown("paper.md")                        # writes paper.md
doc.to_markdown("paper.md", image_mode="external") # paper.md + paper's img/fig_NN_slug.ext
doc.to_markdown(image_mode="drop")                 # drop images (caption-only placeholders)

image_mode controls figures — identically for to_html() and to_markdown():

image_mode	result
"embed" (default)	inline base64 data: URIs — one self-contained string/file
"external"	extract each figure to img/fig_NN_slug.ext (vectors as .svg) and reference it; only when writing to a file (a returned string falls back to "embed")
"drop"	replace images with placeholder text

Because both formats run through the same converter, "external" produces the same img/ layout whether you write .html or .md.

Output modes

By default, logical sections are first-order: every heading becomes its own nested <section id="sec-…">, so you can pull a whole section as one block (great for RAG / LLM chunking), and page numbers are dropped.

distillpdf.open("paper.pdf").to_html(return_string=True)
# <section id="sec-abstract"><h2>Abstract</h2><p>…</p></section>

distillpdf.open("paper.pdf").section("methods")   # → the <section id="sec-methods"> block

Pass mode="page" for the page-faithful structure instead — each page wrapped in <section data-page="N" id="page-N">, with page numbers in the TOC:

distillpdf.open("paper.pdf").to_html(mode="page", return_string=True)

Want compact, text-only output? image_mode="drop" replaces each embedded image with a lightweight <image N> placeholder (captions and figure anchors are kept):

distillpdf.open("paper.pdf").to_html(image_mode="drop", return_string=True)
# <figure id="fig-1"><image 1><figcaption>…</figcaption></figure>

Pass toc=False to skip the auto table-of-contents <nav> (heading anchors are still emitted, so #section links and doc.section(...) keep working):

distillpdf.open("paper.pdf").to_html(toc=False, return_string=True)

Rendering options

open() only loads the PDF; the rendering options live on to_html() and to_markdown() (and mode on toc()/section()), since that's where the content is actually extracted:

Option	Default	Effect
path=	None	where to write: a file, or a directory to place <source-stem>.html/.md in. None writes <source>.html/.md next to the PDF. (Ignored when return_string=True.)
return_string=	False	True returns the rendered string and writes nothing; the default writes a file and returns 1
mode=	"section"	"page" wraps each page in <section data-page="N"> and numbers TOC entries; the default groups content into nested <section id="sec-…"> and drops page info
image_mode=	"embed"	"embed" inline data: URIs (self-contained); "external" an img/ folder (when writing to a file); "drop" placeholder text
toc=	True	False omits the <nav> table of contents (section/heading anchors still emitted)

Raw pieces

Need the structured data instead of HTML?

doc.extract_tables()   # cell grids (handles multi-level / colspan headers)
doc.extract_images()   # embedded images, with raw bytes
doc.extract_links()    # hyperlinks with targets
doc.extract_fonts()    # font inventory
doc.page_count()       # number of pages

Why distillPDF

• Structure, not just text. Two-column reading order, multi-level table headers mapped onto a single grid (colspan), vector figures transcoded to inline SVG (including rotated axis labels), an auto-generated table of contents, and named section extraction (doc.section("methods")).
• LLM-ready output. Lean, class-free HTML — semantic markup a model can read directly, with anchor ids so toc() entries link straight into the document.
• Small & permissive. Pure Rust on lopdf, MIT-licensed, no system dependencies, no Python runtime dependencies. Drops into any pipeline without license headaches.
• Fast. Native Rust extraction with a release build tuned for speed (LTO, single codegen unit).

Scope

In scope: text, table, image, and font extraction, plus an HTML/markdown output layer for RAG and LLM ingestion.

Out of scope (for now): page rendering, PDF generation, OCR.

Comparison

	distillPDF	PyMuPDF	pdfminer.six	Unstructured
License	MIT	AGPL / commercial	MIT	Apache (heavy deps)
Structure-aware HTML	✅	partial	❌	✅
System deps	none	none	none	many
Implementation	Rust	C	Python	Python

Contributing & feedback

This is a young project and feedback is the fastest way to improve it. The most useful things you can do:

1. Try it on your PDFs and tell me where the output is wrong — open an issue.
2. Star the repo if it's useful, so others can find it.
3. PRs welcome — see the development notes below.

Development

The test suite lives in tests/ (pytest) and runs on CI. It needs only distillpdf installed. CI runs entirely on data we own — a self-contained demo PDF (tests/demo/, end-to-end structure check) and a synthetic table corpus (tests/corpus_tables/). The third-party PDF corpora (tests/corpus*/) are gitignored, so their tests self-skip on a fresh clone and run only when the corpora are present locally for deeper coverage.

Build from source with maturin:

git clone https://github.com/kkollsga/distillpdf
cd distillpdf
maturin develop --release    # build + install into the current venv
bash tests/run.sh            # build distillpdf + run pytest
pytest tests/ -q             # or just run the tests against an installed build

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Use it anywhere, including commercial and closed-source projects.