Docling: The Document Alchemist

Docling is an open-source Python library designed to extract data and tables from various document formats, particularly PDFs. It addresses the common data wrangling bottleneck faced by data scientists by converting unstructured documents into structured formats like Markdown, JSON, or Pandas DataFrames. Originating from IBM Research for use in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, the tool integrates with modern AI frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex. The content provides practical code examples for setting up the environment, converting a financial PDF into clean Markdown, and extracting complex tables into a Pandas DataFrame.