MinerU: A High-Quality PDF-to-Markdown/JSON Converter Worth Checking Out

Ever needed to extract structured data from a PDF and groaned at the thought of manual copying or wrestling with finicky parsers? MinerU might be your new best friend. This open-source tool converts PDFs into clean Markdown or JSON—preserving tables, formulas, and layout—without the usual headaches. With 39k GitHub stars and active maintenance, it’s clearly solving a real problem.

What It Does

MinerU is a Python-based tool that transforms PDFs into:

• Markdown: Retains headings, lists, and even complex tables.
• JSON: Structured output for programmatic use (e.g., feeding into pipelines).
  It handles academic papers, reports, and docs with multilingual support (中文 included).

Why It’s Cool

• Accuracy: Unlike naive text extractors, MinerU respects document structure (tables, math formulas).
• Extensible: Docker support, pre-built models, and configurable pipelines.
• Active Development: Recent commits show fixes for edge cases (e.g., table parsing improvements).

How to Try It

1. Quick demo: Check the live demo.
2. Local setup:

   git clone https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU.git
   cd MinerU
   pip install -r requirements.txt
   python demo.py --input your_file.pdf --output markdown  # or json
   

   Or use Docker for a self-contained run.

Final Thoughts

MinerU isn’t perfect—complex layouts might still trip it up—but it’s leagues ahead of basic PDF extractors. If you’re building anything involving document processing (research tools, knowledge bases, etc.), give it a spin. The AGPL-3.0 license means you’ll need to plan accordingly for commercial use, but for prototyping or internal tools, it’s a goldmine.

Pro tip: Skim the docs folder for output examples before diving in. Happy extracting! 🚀