PDF2MD – Rust+Redis+ClickHouse+VLLM conversion pipeline for PDFs
If you just want to use it, try here - https://pdf2md.trieve.ai . I think the LLM's are astoundingly good at converting complex powerpoint style infographics. I wouldn't normally think folks on HN would find this interesting as the general concept has been posted about already in the past few months. We were heavily inspired by Zerox[1]. However, the stack we went with was fun and over-engineered which is more likely to create interesting discussion. We use all the same tools at Trieve (our main product), but wanted to see if they would be a good fit for something that needed to…
PDF2MD – Rust+Redis+ClickHouse+VLLM conversion pipeline for PDFs launched on November 21, 2024 with 13 votes, #1,168 of 4,990 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
PDF2MD is a tool that converts PDF documents to markdown format using a pipeline built with Rust, Redis, ClickHouse, and VLLM. It uses large language models to process PDFs, particularly excelling at converting complex infographics and PowerPoint-style layouts into structured markdown. The tool is available as a web service and built entirely with open-source dependencies, completed in two weeks as a practical demonstration of the technology stack used by Trieve, its creators.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
All-in-one platform for search, recommendations, RAG, and analytics offered via API - trieve/pdf2md at main · devflowinc/trieve
API reference | Meet a Maintainer | Discord | Matrix | [email protected] There's no compelling reason why Rust is necessary for this, but we wanted to have some fun 😜. Everything is free and open source. You can self-host easily with docker-compose or kube following the SELF-HOSTING guide here . Workers horizontally scale on-demand to handle high volume periods. Usually chunk-worker needs to scale before supervisor-worker . Pages for a given Task stream in as the chunk-worker calls out to the LLM to get markdown for them. Trieve has used apache tika to process various filetypes for the past year which means that files with complex layouts and diagrams have been poorly ingested. We saw…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
If you just want to use it, try here - https://pdf2md.trieve.ai . I think the LLM's are astoundingly good at converting complex powerpoint style infographics. I wouldn't normally think folks on HN would find this interesting as the general concept has been posted about already in the past few months. We…
Does a similar job
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