Docling skill

docling-skill

Use docling-skill as the local ingestion gate for document files. It produces an agent-only v2 source.* sidecar set and a compact manifest that must be checked before any agent consumes the content.

Use When

• Input is a local file: pdf, docx, pptx, xls, xlsx, csv, html, txt, md, png, jpg, jpeg, tif, tiff, bmp, or webp.
• Downstream work needs Markdown plus on-demand quality evidence, structured Docling output, or image sidecars.
• The agent needs to decide whether conversion output is safe enough to use.

Do Not Use When

• The source is a remote URL; fetch or browser capture belongs upstream.
• The task is chunking, summarization, tagging, embedding, or knowledge modeling.
• The file is .doc, .ppt, .xlsm, password-protected, corrupt, or a workbook that needs manual semantic preprocessing; ask for a clean .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .csv, or PDF.

Run

Always provide an explicit output directory.

conda run -n docling python -m docling_skill.cli "<input_path>" "<output_dir>"

If the CLI is installed directly:

docling-skill "<input_path>" "<output_dir>"

PDF OCR flags, only when needed:

--ocr-engine auto|tesseract|ocrmac|rapidocr
--ocr-lang <lang>  # repeatable or comma-separated
--force-full-page-ocr
--no-ocr-remediation
--pdf-audit  # optional evidence flag for eligible native formats; renderer support is soft/unavailable by default

Outputs

Expected files:

• source.manifest.json
• source.md
• source.evidence.json

Read source.manifest.json first, then follow decision.read_order.

• Low-risk good output normally has read_order: ["source.md"].
• Warning, salvaged, and failed_for_agent output points to source.evidence.json.
• Use source.evidence.json for structure recovery, quality signals, attempts, page/slide/sheet coverage, spreadsheet metadata, and image placeholders such as [[image:picture-p2-1]].

Do not add downstream fields such as tags, keywords, categories, summaries, embeddings, or chunk IDs to source.manifest.json or source.evidence.json.

Manifest Decision

Inspect these groups:

• Contract: contract_version, producer
• Decision: decision.status, decision.risk_level, decision.agent_ready, decision.read_order
• Source: source.input_type, source.pipeline_family, source.title
• Evidence pointer: artifacts.evidence, warnings, reasons, counts

Decision matrix:

Manifest decision	Agent action
good + low	Use source.md as primary input.
good + medium	Use source.md, but inspect source.evidence.json before relying on details.
salvaged	Use only as OCR-remediated medium-risk output; inspect evidence.
failed_for_agent	Do not present as clean ingestion; report failure evidence from source.evidence.json.

agent_ready: true means default-usable, not semantically proven.

Format Checks

• PDF: inspect evidence quality.signals.page_coverage when page warnings exist, especially failed_pages and first_page_failed.
• Chinese-heavy output: inspect evidence quality.signals.text_normalization and quality.signals.text_integrity.
• Spreadsheets: use evidence structured_document and spreadsheet when merged cells, multi-sheet layout, spans, or offsets matter; Markdown is only a preview.
• Images: image-only output with no usable OCR text should be treated as high risk when the manifest says failed_for_agent.
• Figures/charts: resolve placeholders through evidence images; image extraction is not universal across formats.

Success Signal

• Command exits 0.
• All three v2 source.* files exist in the output directory.
• Manifest has been checked before using source.md.

Failure Report

When ingestion is not clean, report:

• input path and input type
• command exit code or exception
• manifest decision.status, decision.risk_level, reasons, warnings
• relevant evidence quality.signals
• evidence selected_attempt and whether OCR remediation was applied