firecrawl/pdf-inspector

Fast Rust library for PDF classification and text extraction. Detects whether a PDF is text-based or scanned, extracts text with position awareness, and converts to clean Markdown — all without OCR. Includes bindings for Python and Node.js.

Built by Firecrawl to handle text-based PDFs locally in under 200ms, skipping expensive OCR services for the ~54% of PDFs that don't need them.

Evaluated on the opendataloader-bench corpus (200 PDFs). Only direct text extraction engines are shown — no OCR, no ML models. Scores are 0-1, higher is better.

For context, engines that use OCR/ML (docling, marker, mineru) score 0.83-0.88 overall but take 2-180 minutes on the same corpus.

Where we do well: Speed (fastest of all engines), reading order, table detection vs other direct-text tools.

Where we lag: Heading detection trails opendataloader — many PDFs use bold text at body font size for headings, or headings that are only slightly larger than body text. Table detection trails OCR-based engines that can see visual table structure.