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User guide

Docling Studio runs Docling on a PDF and shows what it extracted: every title, paragraph, table, list and picture, with its box drawn on the page.

The interface starts in French. To switch to English, open Paramètres and set Langue to EN. This guide uses the English labels.

flowchart LR
    A(["Import a PDF"]) --> B("Run an analysis") --> C("Open the result")
    C --> D("Check the boxes<br/>and the text")
    C --> E("Ask a question")
    C --> F("Download Markdown<br/>or JSON")

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    classDef blue fill:#2196F31F,stroke:#2196F3,stroke-width:1.5px
    classDef orange fill:#FF57221F,stroke:#FF5722,stroke-width:2px
    classDef teal fill:#0096881F,stroke:#009688,stroke-width:1.5px
    class A grey
    class B blue
    class C orange
    class D,E,F teal

The sidebar

Item What it is for
Home Drop a PDF to import it. Shows counters and your 5 latest documents.
Docs Your PDFs: import, open, analyze several at once, download, delete.
Analyses Every analysis: open the result, delete.
Runs Nothing yet. The page says "Coming soon".
Settings Foldable sections: theme and language, the setup for Ask when Ask is shown (ASK_MODE=visible), and the MCP server.

Import a PDF

  1. Go to Docs and click Import.
  2. Drop one or more PDFs, or click to choose them.
  3. Wait until each file shows Imported.

Only PDFs are accepted; other files are skipped. Files over the size limit (50 MB unless your admin changed it) show File too large.

Importing does not analyze the PDF. That is the next step.

To look at the pages first, open the document from Docs. It shows in the same viewer as a result, without the boxes: switch between Page and Scroll, or type a page number.

Run an analysis

  1. In Docs, click Open visualization on the document.
  2. Click New analysis. While Docling works, a bar under the title shows how far it is: the percentage and the pages done for a long PDF, the time elapsed otherwise. When the analysis completes, its result opens by itself. If it fails, the reason shows next to the button.

There are no options to choose here. The server settings apply: OCR on, table structure on, and the table mode set by the admin ("accurate" by default).

Several documents at once

  1. In Docs, tick the documents to analyze. The box in the header ticks every listed document.
  2. Click Analyze. One analysis starts per document, and Analyses opens.

Their status updates by itself until they end, with the percentage of long PDFs. The server runs three analyses at a time and queues the others. If some analyses cannot start, Docs stays open and lists them with the reason. They stay ticked, so you can try again.

Open the result

The result opens by itself at the end of New analysis. To open it later, go to Analyses and click Open visualization on the row. The status must be COMPLETED.

The result page has three panels:

  • Structure (left): the document tree. Type in Filter elements… to narrow it, or use the button next to the title to expand or collapse everything.
  • Preview (center): the pages, with a colored box on each element. For documents with several pages, switch between Page and Scroll at the top.
  • Properties (right): the selected element. Its type, page and box position, then its text, or the table itself (Open large shows it bigger).

The LAYERS bar above lists each element type with its count. Click a type to hide or show its boxes, or click Hide boxes to hide them all and see the bare page. Show boxes brings them back.

Select an element

Click a box on the page or a row in the tree. The element is selected in the three panels, and the other boxes fade out.

Click Show all, at the right end of the LAYERS bar, to see every box again.

Ask a question

Ask sends a question about the document to a local model (through Ollama) and shows how the answer was built, step by step. It is hidden and off by default: see Enable Ask.

  1. Open a result from Analyses.
  2. In the right panel, click the Ask tab.
  3. Type your question and press Enter, or click Run.

The answer shows up in the panel. Under the preview, the Reasoning timeline lists the steps the model took. Click a step to see the part of the document it read. Click an element to find the step that used it.

How it behaves:

  • One question at a time. The answer arrives in one piece.
  • Questions and answers live in your browser tab. They are not saved.
  • Ask always reads the latest completed analysis of the document, even when you opened an older one.
  • To use another model, type its name in model override. It applies to your next questions until you clear the field.

Download

From Formats
A result page (Analyses, then a row) Download: PDF Document, Markdown, Docling JSON
The Docs list PDF only

Delete

  • A document: in Docs, click Delete on its row. Its analyses are deleted with it.
  • An analysis: in Analyses, click Delete analysis on its row.

There is no undo.

Not in the default screens

These features are in the code but no default screen reaches them in 0.7.3:

  • chunking (splitting the text into pieces for a RAG pipeline),
  • sending chunks to OpenSearch or Neo4j (deprecated, removed in 0.8.0),
  • searching the chunks you sent (deprecated, removed in 0.8.0).

The older Studio pages still offer them. Start the server with STUDIO_MODE_ENABLED=true and open /studio. See Configuration.