Stop OCRing Every PDF: Route It First with pdf-inspector

Description and use

Classify PDFs first with pdf‑inspector, extracting native text locally and routing only pages that need OCR, saving time and cost.

Problem

OCR is often the most expensive and slowest step in a document-ingestion pipeline, yet many PDFs already contain usable text and are still sent through OCR unnecessarily.

Outcome

By classifying PDFs first, the pipeline eliminates unnecessary OCR, saving time and cost while preserving native text structure in Markdown.

Workflow

• 1. Receive PDF
• 2. Classify PDF and its pages using pdf-inspector
• 3. If PDF is TextBased with high confidence, extract native text locally and convert to Markdown
• 4. If pages lack text or are scanned, route those pages to OCR
• 5. Store or index the resulting Markdown for downstream use

Evidence

OCR is often the most expensive and slowest step in a document-ingestion pipeline.

Source

The library classifies PDFs as: TextBased, Scanned, ImageBased, Mixed.

Source

A 40-page report with one scanned appendix does not have to become a 40-page OCR job.

Source