From documents to a RAG corpus in R

Overview

doclingr turns messy documents — PDF, DOCX, PPTX, HTML, images — into structured, AI-ready data. It wraps the Docling Python library through reticulate, giving you layout-aware parsing, table extraction and retrieval-ready chunking with a small, tidy R API.

This vignette walks the full path: document → structure → tables → chunks → embeddings, i.e. everything you need to stand up a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) corpus from R.

One-time setup

doclingr needs the Docling Python package. Install it once into a managed environment, then restart R:

library(doclingr)

install_docling()      # creates an "r-docling" Python environment
# ...restart R...
docling_available()    # TRUE once the backend is ready

Converting a document

docling_convert() runs Docling’s understanding pipeline over a file path or URL and returns a lightweight handle:

doc <- docling_convert("https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09869")
doc
#> <docling_document>
#> source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.09869
#> pages: 9
#> tables: 5
#> figures: 3

Tune the pipeline when you need to. OCR and the accurate table model cost time; turn them down for born-digital documents or large batches:

doc <- docling_convert(
  "report.pdf",
  ocr = FALSE,           # skip OCR for born-digital PDFs
  table_mode = "fast",   # "accurate" (default) or "fast"
  device = "mps"         # "auto", "cpu", "cuda", "mps"
)

# Convert many sources in one batch
docs <- docling_convert(c("a.pdf", "b.docx", "c.html"))

Exporting structure

Render the understood document into the format your downstream tools expect:

as_markdown(doc)   # layout-aware Markdown
as_text(doc)       # plain text
as_html(doc)       # HTML
as_json(doc)       # structured DoclingDocument as a nested R list
as_doctags(doc)    # Docling's DocTags representation

Tables as tibbles

Every detected table comes back as a tibble, in document order:

tables <- docling_tables(doc)
length(tables)
tables[[1]]
#> # A tibble: 12 x 4
#>    Method     Recall Precision  F1
#>    <chr>       <chr>     <chr> <chr>
#>  1 Baseline    0.81      0.78  0.79
#>  ...

Figures

Pull figure captions and pages, and optionally save the images (requires images = TRUE at conversion time):

doc <- docling_convert("paper.pdf", images = TRUE)
figs <- docling_figures(doc, image_dir = "figures")
figs
#> # A tibble: 3 x 4
#>   figure_id caption                 page image_path
#>       <int> <chr>                  <int> <chr>
#> 1         1 "Figure 1: pipeline ..."   2 figures/figure-001.png
#> ...

Chunking for retrieval

docling_chunk() splits the document into context-rich chunks. The default hybrid chunker is token-aware: match its tokenizer to your embedding model and set a budget so chunks fit your model’s context.

chunks <- docling_chunk(
  doc,
  tokenizer = "BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5",
  max_tokens = 512
)
chunks
#> # A tibble: 84 x 7
#>    chunk_id text         raw_text     n_chars headings   pages   n_doc_items
#>       <int> <chr>        <chr>          <int> <list>     <list>        <int>
#>  1        1 "Docling: ..." "Docling..."     412 <chr [2]>  <int [1]>         3
#>  ...

Each chunk’s text is contextualized — enriched with its heading path and table context — which is the form you typically embed. The unmodified text is kept in raw_text.

From chunks to embeddings

doclingr is deliberately provider-agnostic about embeddings: you supply a function that maps a character vector to vectors, and docling_embed() handles batching and tidy assembly. Here is a sketch against an OpenAI-style API:

embed_api <- function(texts) {
  # Call your embedding endpoint; return a matrix with one row per text.
  # e.g. httr2 -> a list of vectors, or a matrix.
}

corpus <- doc |>
  docling_chunk(tokenizer = "BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5", max_tokens = 512) |>
  docling_embed(embed_api, batch_size = 64)

corpus
#> # ... your chunks plus `embedding` (list-column) and `n_dim`

At this point corpus is a tidy table of chunks with their headings, pages and embeddings — ready to write to a vector store, a database, or an in-memory nearest-neighbor index for RAG.

Where to go next

• Use as_json(doc) when you need the full structural detail Docling captured.
• Persist corpus (for example with arrow::write_parquet()) to avoid re-converting and re-embedding.
• See the Docling documentation for the breadth of supported formats and pipeline options.