Tools

Extracts text and tables from PDFs; merges, splits and rotates pages, adds watermarks, fills forms and OCRs scanned documents. The official Anthropic skill behind Claude's document features; source-available, not open source.

Baidu PaddlePaddle's official OCR and document parsing tool: the paddleocr command reads text from images and parses PDFs and scans into Markdown or JSON, supporting 100+ languages with models that run locally.

Official PaddleOCR MCP: text recognition and layout parsing for images and PDFs (PP-OCR, PP-StructureV3, PaddleOCR-VL), returning text or Markdown. Runs inference locally, or calls the official API or a self-hosted service.

Document parser from OpenDataLab that turns PDFs, images and Office files into Markdown or JSON, handling tables, formulas and complex layouts well, with page-by-page reading and citation anchors for agents. Parses locally by default; needs Python 3.10+.

Classic open-source OCR engine and CLI that reads text from images and outputs plain text, hOCR, searchable PDF or TSV. Supports 100+ languages; install the language data for each language you need.

Parses PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, images and audio, recovering layout, reading order, tables and formulas, and exports Markdown, HTML or lossless JSON. Started by IBM Research, now hosted by the LF AI & Data Foundation; runs fully locally.

Free, open-source offline OCR desktop app for screenshots, batch images, scanned PDFs and QR codes, callable via the umi-ocr CLI or an HTTP API (the CLI relies on the app's local HTTP service, on by default). Windows and Linux only.

Converts PDFs, images, PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, EPUB and more into Markdown, JSON or HTML, preserving tables, formulas and layout, with optional LLM help for higher accuracy. Needs Python 3.10+ and PyTorch; large-scale commercial use of the model weights needs a paid license.

Adds a searchable, copyable text layer to scanned PDFs, with automatic deskew, rotation and size optimization, outputting PDF/A by default. Built on Tesseract, supports 100+ languages and runs fully locally.

AI2's tool for converting PDFs and scans to Markdown with a vision LLM, handling equations, tables, handwriting and multi-column layouts, suited to bulk digitizing papers and archives. Local runs need an NVIDIA GPU with 12GB+ VRAM; otherwise use a paid OpenAI-compatible remote endpoint.

Recognizes images or whole PDFs (including scans) with math formulas and tables into Markdown and LaTeX, strong on English and Chinese and supporting 80+ languages, handy for digitizing exams, lecture notes and study notes. An open-source Mathpix alternative that runs locally with Python.

Converts PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB, web pages and images to clean Markdown locally, keeping page anchors, tables and two-column reading order, with full-text search across folders. Formerly pdf-reader-mcp; no uploads, no API key. Needs Node.js 18+; OCR for scans needs tesseract.

Describe what you need and get a typeset PDF: turn handwritten notes or scanned textbooks into LaTeX handouts and cheat sheets, make exams with answer keys, write papers, theses, posters, resumes and letters. 27 templates plus chart and mail-merge scripts. Needs TeX Live (install script included).

The Docling project's official MCP: converts PDF, Word, PowerPoint and more into structured documents with layout and table detection and OCR for scans, and lets agents build new documents paragraph by paragraph and export Markdown. Local mode needs Python and uv, or use your own Docling Serve.

Turns web pages, long PDFs, Word files, images or code into tutor-style study notes: Markdown notes plus searchable HTML knowledge cards with concept breakdowns and mind maps. Needs Python 3.8+, plus Chrome for some sites; the optional tutor chat needs an OpenAI-compatible API key.

MinerU's official MCP: parses PDF, Word, PowerPoint and images into Markdown via the mineru.net cloud API, keeping tables and formulas. The keyless Flash mode works out of the box; add a token for higher quotas and more formats.