IBM Research Zurich's AI for knowledge team made Docling publicly available as an open-source document conversion toolkit. The first public release, version 0.1.1, appeared on July 15, followed by version 1.0 three days later. The software combines specialised AI models for document layout and table structure with a pipeline that extracts useful information from PDFs.
Released under the permissive MIT licence, Docling was designed to run on ordinary computing hardware and to support extensions with additional models and processing features. Its structured document outputs provide a foundation for search, retrieval-augmented generation and AI training workflows. The pipeline moves beyond extracting isolated text by preserving document organisation and tables, making information in complex reports and other PDFs more accessible to downstream software.
