Your first conversion in three steps#
- Prepare one page
Screenshot or export a single page as PNG or JPEG. Straight, sharp captures work best; the demo also includes sample pages in English, Arabic and Chinese.
- Upload it or pick a sample
Choose a document from the gallery or upload your image.
- Send a prompt
Start with
Convert this page to docling.— the model returns DocTags, which the demo renders with layout boxes.
Prompts that work#
| Prompt | Returns |
|---|---|
Convert this page to docling. | The whole page as DocTags (layout, text, tables, pictures) |
Convert this table to OTSL. | Table structure in OTSL markup |
Convert formula to latex. | LaTeX for a formula crop |
Convert code to text. | Code from an image of code |
Convert chart to OTSL. | Chart values as a table |
Extract all picture elements on the page. | Picture locations |
What is the Net income in 2008? | A question about a table (sample document) |
Prompts taken from the demo's own sample set. The model card describes multilingual support (Japanese, Arabic, Chinese) as experimental.
What the demo is — and isn't#
| Online demo | Docling on your machine | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | Granite-Docling-258M (VLM) | Standard pipeline by default, or any of 22 VLM presets |
| Input | One page image | 36 formats, whole documents, folders |
| Output | DocTags rendered in the page | Markdown, JSON, HTML, chunks and 8 more |
| Privacy | Image is sent to Hugging Face | Stays on your machine |
| Cost | Free, queued | Free (MIT), your hardware |
Run the full Docling UI locally#
docling-serve includes a browser playground that converts real documents with all the options:
pip install "docling-serve[ui]"
docling-serve run --enable-ui
# open http://127.0.0.1:5001/uiOr with a container: docker run -p 5001:5001 -e DOCLING_SERVE_ENABLE_UI=1 quay.io/docling-project/docling-serve-cpu. Details in the docling-serve guide.
See the real pipeline on a real paper#
Want to know what the standard pipeline produces before installing? Our chunk visualizer shows the actual output of Docling 2.143.1 on its own technical report, and the benchmark shows its tables next to other tools'.
Frequently asked questions
Is there an online version of Docling?
There is no official hosted converter for whole documents, but IBM publishes a free Granite-Docling demo on Hugging Face that converts single page images. For full documents, install Docling locally or run docling-serve with its web UI. IBM also offers a managed 'Docling for IBM watsonx' service.
Is the Docling online demo free?
Yes. It is a public Hugging Face Space. It runs on shared GPUs, so you may wait in a queue.
Can I upload a PDF to the online demo?
The demo expects a single page image. Take a screenshot or export one page of your PDF as PNG or JPEG.
How do I get a local Docling web interface?
pip install "docling-serve[ui]" and run docling-serve run --enable-ui, then open http://127.0.0.1:5001/ui. It converts full documents with the options of the standard and VLM pipelines.
Sources
- Granite-Docling demo on Hugging Face (ibm-granite/granite-docling-258m-demo)
- Granite-Docling-258M model card