Firecrawl Ships a Rust PDF-to-Markdown Parser That Skips OCR

pdf-inspector picked up roughly 1,700 stars in a day. It is an MIT-licensed Rust library that classifies a PDF as text, scanned, image or mixed in 10 to 50 milliseconds, then extracts position-aware text and converts it to Markdown without invoking OCR on documents that never needed it. Table detection, multi-column reading order and CID font support are included, with bindings for Python, Node and WebAssembly. On a 200-PDF corpus the maintainers report it beating PyMuPDF4LLM, MarkItDown and liteparse on both accuracy and speed. The WASM target means documents can be processed without leaving the browser.