Two tools are available depending on your needs:

Tool Best For Speed Size

pymupdf Simple text PDFs Very fast (~12s for 7 files) ~15MB

marker-pdf Complex PDFs with tables, images, OCR Slow ~2GB models

Setup

Both tools are installed in the agent-instructions poetry environment:

cd ~/brain/git/personal/agent-instructions poetry install # if not already done

PyMuPDF (Recommended for text-only PDFs)

Fast and lightweight. Use this for most PDFs.

Single File

cd ~/brain/git/personal/agent-instructions poetry run pymupdf gettext -mode layout -output "/path/to/output.md" "/path/to/file.pdf"

Batch Conversion

cd ~/brain/git/personal/agent-instructions for pdf in /path/to/pdfs/*.pdf; do name=$(basename "$pdf" .pdf) poetry run pymupdf gettext -mode layout -output "/path/to/output/${name}.md" "$pdf" done

Options

Option Description

-mode

simple , blocks , or layout (default: layout preserves formatting)

-output

Output file path

-pages

Page range to extract

marker-pdf (For complex PDFs)

Use when you need OCR, table extraction, or image handling.

Single File

cd ~/brain/git/personal/agent-instructions poetry run marker_single "/path/to/file.pdf" --output_dir "/path/to/output"

Options

Option Description

--output_dir

Directory to save output

--output_format

markdown , json , html , or chunks

--page_range

Process specific pages, e.g., "0,5-10,20"

--force_ocr

Force OCR on all text

First Run

On first use, marker downloads ML models (~2GB). This happens once.

Notes

• Fully local: Both tools process entirely on your machine, no cloud

• PyMuPDF: Best for clean, text-based PDFs

• marker-pdf: Best for scanned docs, tables, or complex layouts