markitdown

The problem is familiar to anyone who has fed documents to a model: inside, a PDF holds not text but character coordinates on a page. Hand one over directly and the table falls apart, headings blend into captions, and column order becomes a matter of luck. Microsoft's markitdown converts the document into markdown and keeps the structure: headings stay headings, tables stay tables, lists stay lists.

The model then reads the document the way a person does rather than as a stream of words. "Let the model read this document" comes up all the time, and here it is handled by one utility that runs locally. The documents go nowhere, which matters when they are contracts or an export from your own database.