Alternative pdf parser (docling)

[yasirdemircan]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
No , it is an enhancement

Describe the solution you'd like
Using docling as the pdf parser instead of pdf2text if the performance requirements would not outweight the benefits.

Performance of the library and issues about it

Approximately 30 seconds for parsing a FIPS-140 document and 1 minutes for a CC artifact.
I have tested the library with 72 FIPS certs and 1 CC certificate so far.

The library is better at parsing tables than pdf2text and lets you output Pandas dataframes from PDF tables.

Page headings labeling feature can be used to distinguish cert id clearly from references.

The library is bad at detecting sentence boundaries , additional sentence tokenization is needed for semantic analysis work.

We can discard unnecessary parts of the certificates during analysis like captions or footnotes from detected labels.

[adamjanovsky]

Better parser would be a welcomed additional. I'm proposing some next steps:

• Identify number of documents to run the qualitative evaluation against
• Run docling on those documents, measure the performance (on GPU).
• Specify requirements for incremental updates (in order to avoiding unnecessary conversions in periodic pipelines)
• Evalute the output quality, compare to pdftotext.

I propose waiting a bit with this. As @mukrop said, we'll host a meeting soon to prioritize goals for next year. Maybe there'll be more pressing tasks.