Firecrawl Releases pdf-inspector, a Fast Rust Library for PDF Classification
Firecrawl has released `pdf-inspector`, a fast Rust-based library designed to inspect, classify, and extract text from PDF documents. The library programmatically determines whether a PDF is scanned (requiring OCR) or text-based to enable smart routing. This tool helps developers optimize document processing and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines by avoiding expensive OCR operations on PDFs that already contain extractable text. Written in Rust for high performance, the library focuses on fast classification to make routing decisions before heavy processing begins.
## BACKGROUND
In document processing, PDFs generally fall into two categories: native text-based PDFs where text can be directly extracted, and scanned PDFs which are essentially images. Processing scanned PDFs requires Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which is computationally expensive and slow compared to direct text extraction.