Open-Source Document Parsing and Layout Analysis Engines in Production: Comparing Docling, Marker, MinerU, and Unstructured
Production retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and document agent systems often fail before a single vector embedding is calculated or an LLM prompt is constructed. The breakdown occurs at the document ingestion boundary. Standard text extraction utilities, such as pypdf or raw pdfminer, extract text streams sequentially without spatial awareness. When processing multi-column academic papers, financial reports with multi-header tables, or technical manuals with complex formulas, these naive ext
1 min