Document Parsing Engines in Production RAG: Comparing Docling, MinerU, Marker, and Unstructured Architecture, Table Structure Recognition, Reading Order Recovery, and Ingestion Economics
Document parsing remains one of the primary failure modes in enterprise Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. While modern embedding models and vector databases offer sub-millisecond retrieval across millions of dense vectors, downstream generation quality remains bounded by the structural fidelity of upstream document ingestion. Naive text extractors like PyPDF or basic PDFMiner strip away structural metadata, flattening multi-column text into interleaved sentences, shredding table ro
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