Convert PDF to markdown + JSON quickly with high accuracy

Marker converts documents to markdown, JSON, chunks, and HTML quickly and accurately.

• Converts PDF, image, PPTX, DOCX, XLSX, HTML, EPUB files in all languages
• Formats tables, forms, equations, inline math, links, references, and code blocks
• Extracts and saves images
• Removes headers/footers/other artifacts
• Extensible with your own formatting and logic
• Does structured extraction, given a JSON schema (beta)
• Optionally boost accuracy with LLMs (and your own prompt)
• Works on GPU, CPU, or MPS

Marker benchmarks favorably compared to cloud services like Llamaparse and Mathpix, as well as other open source tools.

The above results are running single PDF pages serially. Marker is significantly faster when running in batch mode, with a projected throughput of 25 pages/second on an H100.

See below for detailed speed and accuracy benchmarks, and instructions on how to run your own benchmarks.

For the highest accuracy, pass the --use_llm flag to use an LLM alongside marker. This will do things like merge tables across pages, handle inline math, format tables properly, and extract values from forms. It can use any gemini or ollama model. By default, it uses gemini-2.0-flash. See below for details.

Here is a table benchmark comparing marker, gemini flash alone, and marker with use_llm:

As you can see, the use_llm mode offers higher accuracy than marker or gemini alone.

I want marker to be as widely accessible as possible, while still funding my development/training costs. Research and personal usage is always okay, but there are some restrictions on commercial usage.

The weights for the models are licensed cc-by-nc-sa-4.0, but I will waive that for any organization under $2M USD in gross revenue in the most recent 12-month period AND under $2M in lifetime VC/angel funding raised. You also must not be competitive with the Datalab API. If you want to remove the GPL license requirements (dual-license) and/or use the weights commercially over the revenue limit, check out the options here.

There's a hosted API for marker available here:

• Supports PDF, image, PPT, PPTX, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, HTML, EPUB files
• 1/4th the price of leading cloud-based competitors
• Fast - ~15s for a 250 page PDF
• Supports LLM mode
• High uptime (99.99%)

Discord is where we discuss future development.

You'll need python 3.10+ and PyTorch.

Install with:

pip install marker-pdf

If you want to use marker on documents other than PDFs, you will need to install additional dependencies with:

pip install marker-pdf[full]

First, some configuration:

• Your torch device will be automatically detected, but you can override this. For example, TORCH_DEVICE=cuda.
• Some PDFs, even digital ones, have bad text in them. Set --force_ocr to force OCR on all lines, or the strip_existing_ocr to keep all digital text, and strip out any existing OCR text.
• If you care about inline math, set force_ocr to convert inline math to LaTeX.

I've included a streamlit app that lets you interactively try marker with some basic options. Run it with:

pip install streamlit streamlit-ace
marker_gui

marker_single /path/to/file.pdf

You can pass in PDFs or images.

Options:

• --page_range TEXT: Specify which pages to process. Accepts comma-separated page numbers and ranges. Example: --page_range "0,5-10,20" will process pages 0, 5 through 10, and page 20.
• --output_format [markdown|json|html|chunks]: Specify the format for the output results.
• --output_dir PATH: Directory where output files will be saved. Defaults to the value specified in settings.OUTPUT_DIR.
• --paginate_output: Paginates the output, using \n\n{PAGE_NUMBER} followed by - * 48, then \n\n
• --use_llm: Uses an LLM to improve accuracy. You will need to configure the LLM backend - see below.
• --force_ocr: Force OCR processing on the entire document, even for pages that might contain extractable text. This will also format inline math properly.
• --block_correction_prompt: if LLM mode is active, an optional prompt that will be used to correct the output of marker. This is useful for custom formatting or logic that you want to apply to the output.
• --strip_existing_ocr: Remove all existing OCR text in the document and re-OCR with surya.
• --redo_inline_math: If you want the absolute highest quality inline math conversion, use this along with --use_llm.
• --disable_image_extraction: Don't extract images from the PDF. If you also specify --use_llm, then images will be replaced with a description.
• --debug: Enable debug mode for additional logging and diagnostic information.
• --processors TEXT: Override the default processors by providing their full module paths, separated by commas. Example: --processors "module1.processor1,module2.processor2"
• --config_json PATH: Path to a JSON configuration file containing additional settings.
• config --help: List all available builders, processors, and converters, and their associated configuration. These values can be used to build a JSON configuration file for additional tweaking of marker defaults.
• --converter_cls: One of marker.converters.pdf.PdfConverter (default) or marker.converters.table.TableConverter. The PdfConverter will convert the whole PDF, the TableConverter will only extract and convert tables.
• --llm_service: Which llm service to use if --use_llm is passed. This defaults to marker.services.gemini.GoogleGeminiService.
• --help: see all of the flags that can be passed into marker. (it supports many more options then are listed above)

The list of supported languages for surya OCR is here. If you don't need OCR, marker can work with any language.

marker /path/to/input/folder

• marker supports all the same options from marker_single above.
• --workers is the number of conversion workers to run simultaneously. This is automatically set by default, but you can increase it to increase throughput, at the cost of more CPU/GPU usage. Marker will use 5GB of VRAM per worker at the peak, and 3.5GB average.

NUM_DEVICES=4 NUM_WORKERS=15 marker_chunk_convert ../pdf_in ../md_out

• NUM_DEVICES is the number of GPUs to use. Should be 2 or greater.
• NUM_WORKERS is the number of parallel processes to run on each GPU.

See the PdfConverter class at marker/converters/pdf.py function for additional arguments that can be passed.

from marker.converters.pdf import PdfConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict
from marker.output import text_from_rendered

converter = PdfConverter(
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
)
rendered = converter("FILEPATH")
text, _, images = text_from_rendered(rendered)

rendered will be a pydantic basemodel with different properties depending on the output type requested. With markdown output (default), you'll have the properties markdown, metadata, and images. For json output, you'll have children, block_type, and metadata.

You can pass configuration using the ConfigParser. To see all available options, do marker_single --help.

from marker.converters.pdf import PdfConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict
from marker.config.parser import ConfigParser

config = {
    "output_format": "json",
    "ADDITIONAL_KEY": "VALUE"
}
config_parser = ConfigParser(config)

converter = PdfConverter(
    config=config_parser.generate_config_dict(),
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
    processor_list=config_parser.get_processors(),
    renderer=config_parser.get_renderer(),
    llm_service=config_parser.get_llm_service()
)
rendered = converter("FILEPATH")

Each document consists of one or more pages. Pages contain blocks, which can themselves contain other blocks. It's possible to programmatically manipulate these blocks.

Here's an example of extracting all forms from a document:

from marker.converters.pdf import PdfConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict
from marker.schema import BlockTypes

converter = PdfConverter(
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
)
document = converter.build_document("FILEPATH")
forms = document.contained_blocks((BlockTypes.Form,))

Look at the processors for more examples of extracting and manipulating blocks.

You can also use other converters that define different conversion pipelines:

The TableConverter will only convert and extract tables:

from marker.converters.table import TableConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict
from marker.output import text_from_rendered

converter = TableConverter(
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
)
rendered = converter("FILEPATH")
text, _, images = text_from_rendered(rendered)

This takes all the same configuration as the PdfConverter. You can specify the configuration force_layout_block=Table to avoid layout detection and instead assume every page is a table. Set output_format=json to also get cell bounding boxes.

You can also run this via the CLI with

marker_single FILENAME --use_llm --force_layout_block Table --converter_cls marker.converters.table.TableConverter --output_format json

If you only want to run OCR, you can also do that through the OCRConverter. Set --keep_chars to keep individual characters and bounding boxes.

from marker.converters.ocr import OCRConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict

converter = OCRConverter(
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
)
rendered = converter("FILEPATH")

This takes all the same configuration as the PdfConverter.

You can also run this via the CLI with

marker_single FILENAME --converter_cls marker.converters.ocr.OCRConverter

You can run structured extraction via the ExtractionConverter. This requires an llm service to be setup first (see here for details). You'll get a JSON output with the extracted values.

from marker.converters.extraction import ExtractionConverter
from marker.models import create_model_dict
from marker.config.parser import ConfigParser
from pydantic import BaseModel

class Links(BaseModel):
    links: list[str]
    
schema = Links.model_json_schema()
config_parser = ConfigParser({
    "page_schema": schema
})

converter = ExtractionConverter(
    artifact_dict=create_model_dict(),
    config=config_parser.generate_config_dict(),
    llm_service=config_parser.get_llm_service(),
)
rendered = converter("FILEPATH")

Rendered will have an original_markdown field. If you pass this back in next time you run the converter, as the existing_markdown config key, you can skip re-parsing the document.

Markdown output will include:

• image links (images will be saved in the same folder)
• formatted tables
• embedded LaTeX equations (fenced with $$)
• Code is fenced with triple backticks
• Superscripts for footnotes

HTML output is similar to markdown output:

• Images are included via img tags
• equations are fenced with <math> tags
• code is in pre tags

JSON output will be organized in a tree-like structure, with the leaf nodes being blocks. Examples of leaf nodes are a single list item, a paragraph of text, or an image.

The output will be a list, with each list item representing a page. Each page is considered a block in the internal marker schema. There are different types of blocks to represent different elements.

Pages have the keys:

• id - unique id for the block.
• block_type - the type of block. The possible block types can be seen in marker/schema/__init__.py. As of this writing, they are ["Line", "Span", "FigureGroup", "TableGroup", "ListGroup", "PictureGroup", "Page", "Caption", "Code", "Figure", "Footnote", "Form", "Equation", "Handwriting", "TextInlineMath", "ListItem", "PageFooter", "PageHeader", "Picture", "SectionHeader", "Table", "Text", "TableOfContents", "Document"]
• html - the HTML for the page. Note that this will have recursive references to children. The content-ref tags must be replaced with the child content if you want the full html. You can see an example of this at marker/output.py:json_to_html. That function will take in a single block from the json output, and turn it into HTML.
• polygon - the 4-corner polygon of the page, in (x1,y1), (x2,y2), (x3, y3), (x4, y4) format. (x1,y1) is the top left, and coordinates go clockwise.
• children - the child blocks.

The child blocks have two additional keys:

• section_hierarchy - indicates the sections that the block is part of. 1 indicates an h1 tag, 2 an h2, and so on.
• images - base64 encoded images. The key will be the block id, and the data will be the encoded image.

Note that child blocks of pages can have their own children as well (a tree structure).

{
      "id": "/page/10/Page/366",
      "block_type": "Page",
      "html": "<content-ref src='/page/10/SectionHeader/0'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/SectionHeader/1'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/Text/2'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/Text/3'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/Figure/4'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/SectionHeader/5'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/SectionHeader/6'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/TextInlineMath/7'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/TextInlineMath/8'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/Table/9'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/SectionHeader/10'></content-ref><content-ref src='/page/10/Text/11'></content-ref>",
      "polygon": [[0.0, 0.0], [612.0, 0.0], [612.0, 792.0], [0.0, 792.0]],
      "children": [
        {
          "id": "/page/10/SectionHeader/0",
          "block_type": "SectionHeader",
          "html": "<h1>Supplementary Material for <i>Subspace Adversarial Training</i> </h1>",
          "polygon": [
            [217.845703125, 80.630859375], [374.73046875, 80.630859375],
            [374.73046875, 107.0],
            [217.845703125, 107.0]
          ],
          "children": null,
          "section_hierarchy": {
            "1": "/page/10/SectionHeader/1"
          },
          "images": {}
        },
        ...
        ]
    }

Chunks format is similar to JSON, but flattens everything into a single list instead of a tree. Only the top level blocks from each page show up. It also has the full HTML of each block inside, so you don't need to crawl the tree to reconstruct it. This enable flexible and easy chunking for RAG.

All output formats will return a metadata dictionary, with the following fields:

{
    "table_of_contents": [
      {
        "title": "Introduction",
        "heading_level": 1,
        "page_id": 0,
        "polygon": [...]
      }
    ], // computed PDF table of contents
    "page_stats": [
      {
        "page_id":  0, 
        "text_extraction_method": "pdftext",
        "block_counts": [("Span", 200), ...]
      },
      ...
    ]
}

When running with the --use_llm flag, you have a choice of services you can use:

• Gemini - this will use the Gemini developer API by default. You'll need to pass --gemini_api_key to configuration.
• Google Vertex - this will use vertex, which can be more reliable. You'll need to pass --vertex_project_id. To use it, set --llm_service=marker.services.vertex.GoogleVertexService.
• Ollama - this will use local models. You can configure --ollama_base_url and --ollama_model. To use it, set --llm_service=marker.services.ollama.OllamaService.
• Claude - this will use the anthropic API. You can configure --claude_api_key, and --claude_model_name. To use it, set --llm_service=marker.services.claude.ClaudeService.
• OpenAI - this supports any openai-like endpoint. You can configure --openai_api_key, --openai_model, and --openai_base_url. To use it, set --llm_service=marker.services.openai.OpenAIService.
• Azure OpenAI - this uses the Azure OpenAI service. You can configure --azure_endpoint, --azure_api_key, and --deployment_name. To use it, set --llm_service=marker.services.azure_openai.AzureOpenAIService.

These services may have additional optional configuration as well - you can see it by viewing the classes.

Marker is easy to extend. The core units of marker are:

• Providers, at marker/providers. These provide information from a source file, like a PDF.
• Builders, at marker/builders. These generate the initial document blocks and fill in text, using info from the providers.
• Processors, at marker/processors. These process specific blocks, for example the table formatter is a processor.
• Renderers, at marker/renderers. These use the blocks to render output.
• Schema, at marker/schema. The classes for all the block types.
• Converters, at marker/converters. They run the whole end to end pipeline.

To customize processing behavior, override the processors. To add new output formats, write a new renderer. For additional input formats, write a new provider.

Processors and renderers can be directly passed into the base PDFConverter, so you can specify your own custom processing easily.

There is a very simple API server you can run like this:

pip install -U uvicorn fastapi python-multipart
marker_server --port 8001

This will start a fastapi server that you can access at localhost:8001. You can go to localhost:8001/docs to see the endpoint options.

You can send requests like this:

import requests
import json

post_data = {
    'filepath': 'FILEPATH',
    # Add other params here
}

requests.post("http://localhost:8001/marker", data=json.dumps(post_data)).json()

Note that this is not a very robust API, and is only intended for small-scale use. If you want to use this server, but want a more robust conversion option, you can use the hosted Datalab API.

There are some settings that you may find useful if things aren't working the way you expect:

• If you have issues with accuracy, try setting --use_llm to use an LLM to improve quality. You must set GOOGLE_API_KEY to a Gemini API key for this to work.
• Make sure to set force_ocr if you see garbled text - this will re-OCR the document.
• TORCH_DEVICE - set this to force marker to use a given torch device for inference.
• If you're getting out of memory errors, decrease worker count. You can also try splitting up long PDFs into multiple files.

Pass the debug option to activate debug mode. This will save images of each page with detected layout and text, as well as output a json file with additional bounding box information.

We created a benchmark set by extracting single PDF pages from common crawl. We scored based on a heuristic that aligns text with ground truth text segments, and an LLM as a judge scoring method.

Benchmarks were run on an H100 for markjer and docling - llamaparse and mathpix used their cloud services. We can also look at it by document type:

We benchmarked throughput using a single long PDF.

The projected throughput is 122 pages per second on an H100 - we can run 22 individual processes given the VRAM used.

Marker can extract tables from PDFs using marker.converters.table.TableConverter. The table extraction performance is measured by comparing the extracted HTML representation of tables against the original HTML representations using the test split of FinTabNet. The HTML representations are compared using a tree edit distance based metric to judge both structure and content. Marker detects and identifies the structure of all tables in a PDF page and achieves these scores:

The --use_llm flag can significantly improve table recognition performance, as you can see.

We filter out tables that we cannot align with the ground truth, since fintabnet and our layout model have slightly different detection methods (this results in some tables being split/merged).

You can benchmark the performance of marker on your machine. Install marker manually with:

git clone https://github.com/VikParuchuri/marker.git
poetry install

Download the benchmark data here and unzip. Then run the overall benchmark like this:

python benchmarks/overall.py --methods marker --scores heuristic,llm

Options:

• --use_llm use an llm to improve the marker results.
• --max_rows how many rows to process for the benchmark.
• --methods can be llamaparse, mathpix, docling, marker. Comma separated.
• --scores which scoring functions to use, can be llm, heuristic. Comma separated.

The processed FinTabNet dataset is hosted here and is automatically downloaded. Run the benchmark with:

python benchmarks/table/table.py --max_rows 100

Options:

• --use_llm uses an llm with marker to improve accuracy.
• --use_gemini also benchmarks gemini 2.0 flash.

Marker is a pipeline of deep learning models:

• Extract text, OCR if necessary (heuristics, surya)
• Detect page layout and find reading order (surya)
• Clean and format each block (heuristics, texify, surya)
• Optionally use an LLM to improve quality
• Combine blocks and postprocess complete text

It only uses models where necessary, which improves speed and accuracy.

PDF is a tricky format, so marker will not always work perfectly. Here are some known limitations that are on the roadmap to address:

• Very complex layouts, with nested tables and forms, may not work
• Forms may not be rendered well

Note: Passing the --use_llm and --force_ocr flags will mostly solve these issues.