Installation

To use Docling, simply install docling from your Python package manager, e.g. pip:

pip install docling

Works on macOS, Linux, and Windows, with support for both x86_64 and arm64 architectures.

Alternative PyTorch distributions

The Docling models depend on the PyTorch library. Depending on your architecture, you might want to use a different distribution of torch. For example, you might want support for different accelerator or for a cpu-only version. All the different ways for installing torch are listed on their website https://pytorch.org/.

One common situation is the installation on Linux systems with cpu-only support. In this case, we suggest the installation of Docling with the following options

# Example for installing on the Linux cpu-only version
pip install docling --extra-index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cpu

Alternative OCR engines

Docling supports multiple OCR engines for processing scanned documents. The current version provides the following engines.

Engine	Installation	Usage
EasyOCR	Default in Docling or via `pip install easyocr`.	`EasyOcrOptions`
Tesseract	System dependency. See description for Tesseract and Tesserocr below.	`TesseractOcrOptions`
Tesseract CLI	System dependency. See description below.	`TesseractCliOcrOptions`
OcrMac	System dependency. See description below.	`OcrMacOptions`
RapidOCR	Extra feature not included in Default Docling installation can be installed via `pip install rapidocr_onnxruntime`	`RapidOcrOptions`

The Docling DocumentConverter allows to choose the OCR engine with the ocr_options settings. For example

from docling.datamodel.base_models import ConversionStatus, PipelineOptions
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import PipelineOptions, EasyOcrOptions, TesseractOcrOptions
from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter

pipeline_options = PipelineOptions()
pipeline_options.do_ocr = True
pipeline_options.ocr_options = TesseractOcrOptions()  # Use Tesseract

doc_converter = DocumentConverter(
    pipeline_options=pipeline_options,
)

Tesseract installation

Tesseract is a popular OCR engine which is available on most operating systems. For using this engine with Docling, Tesseract must be installed on your system, using the packaging tool of your choice. Below we provide example commands. After installing Tesseract you are expected to provide the path to its language files using the TESSDATA_PREFIX environment variable (note that it must terminate with a slash /).

macOS (via Homebrew)Debian-basedRHEL

brew install tesseract leptonica pkg-config
TESSDATA_PREFIX=/opt/homebrew/share/tessdata/
echo "Set TESSDATA_PREFIX=${TESSDATA_PREFIX}"

apt-get install tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng libtesseract-dev libleptonica-dev pkg-config
TESSDATA_PREFIX=$(dpkg -L tesseract-ocr-eng | grep tessdata$)
echo "Set TESSDATA_PREFIX=${TESSDATA_PREFIX}"

dnf install tesseract tesseract-devel tesseract-langpack-eng leptonica-devel
TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/share/tesseract/tessdata/
echo "Set TESSDATA_PREFIX=${TESSDATA_PREFIX}"

Linking to Tesseract

The most efficient usage of the Tesseract library is via linking. Docling is using the Tesserocr package for this.

If you get into installation issues of Tesserocr, we suggest using the following installation options:

pip uninstall tesserocr
pip install --no-binary :all: tesserocr

ocrmac installation

ocrmac is using Apple's vision(or livetext) framework as OCR backend. For using this engine with Docling, ocrmac must be installed on your system. This only works on macOS systems with newer macOS versions (10.15+).

pip install ocrmac

Development setup

To develop Docling features, bugfixes etc., install as follows from your local clone's root dir:

poetry install --all-extras