project1 min read
docling-web: a web UI for the library that won't let you use it
Docling is a great PDF to Markdown library. Using it directly is the kind of pain that makes you give up. So I wrapped it in a web UI, packed it in a single Docker image, and pushed it public.
Docling is genuinely good at turning PDFs into clean Markdown. Tables come out as tables. OCR works. Structure stays intact. It nails the things most converters butcher.
The catch is that getting it running yourself is a slog. Heavy ML dependencies. Model caches to manage. A small pile of glue code before you can convert a single page. By the time you've done all that, you've forgotten why you wanted the Markdown in the first place.
Most people won't bother. The output is great if you can get there. The path to get there is what made me build this.
What it does
Drag a PDF into the browser. Or fifty PDFs. Watch the queue work through them. Markdown shows up in a side by side preview against the original document, so you can see what it actually got right.
That's the whole UI. No accounts. No setup steps. Just paste your file in, get your Markdown out.
Pull it
One Docker image. No host setup. No Python environment to babysit.
docker run -d \
-p 6176:8176 \
-v docling-data:/data \
-v docling-cache:/root/.cache/docling \
akl49879/docling-web:latest
Open localhost:6176. That's it.
The image is on Docker Hub. The code is on GitHub. Both public. Use it if it saves you an afternoon.