docling

One skill covering every document format the category exists for — including scanned PDFs and RAG chunking — from the maintainers of the parser itself.

Verified for:

Install

$ pip install docling && uvx library-skills --claude

The skill ships inside the Python package, so library-skills symlinks it into .claude/skills and it updates with the package. Requires Python 3.10+.

Best for

Reading or converting documents the agent cannot open directly, at 65K stars and MIT: scanned PDFs, Office formats, tables, and chunking a corpus for retrieval.

Not ideal for

Producing polished Office files. Docling is a reader and converter — for generating a styled DOCX, XLSX or PPTX, the Anthropic document skills are the better fit.

About this skill

Use Docling to understand the content of documents in any supported format — PDF (born-digital or scanned), DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, CSV, images, audio, and XML — by converting them into a unified DoclingDocument (Markdown or structured JSON). Use whenever you need to read, parse, convert, extract, or chunk a document you cannot read directly: "what's in this PDF", "convert this to markdown", "extract the tables", "chunk this for RAG", "read this scanned document", "parse this DOCX/PPTX". Covers the docling CLI, the Python SDK, the remote Service Client, and the docling-slim install extras.

PDFOCRRAG

Score breakdown

Score breakdown

rubric 1.0
Install count
0/20
Provenance
12.8/15
GitHub stars
13.6/15
Recency
10/10
Compatibility
6/10
Documentation depth
10/10
Install ergonomics
10/10
License
5/5
Verification freshness
0.5/5

Composite 0–100 score derived from 9 verifiable signals. See the rubric →

Official

Extract, fill, merge. PDF manipulation with bundled scripts so Claude does not waste tokens generating them.

PDFFormsRead-write
All surfaces
Low1 min

Word documents end-to-end. Create, edit, comment, track-change.

WordReportsRead-write
All surfaces
Low1 min

Excel spreadsheets with real formulas, charts, and formatting — not flat CSV exports.

ExcelFormulasCharts
All surfaces
Low1 min

Ranked #1 in Documents

Publish the ranking in your README. The badge reads the live score, so it updates when the ranking does.

docling — ranked #1 in Documents on Top Agent Skills
Markdown
[![docling — ranked #1 in Documents on Top Agent Skills](https://top-agent-skills.com/badge/docling.svg)](https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/docling)
HTML
<a href="https://top-agent-skills.com/skill/docling"><img src="https://top-agent-skills.com/badge/docling.svg" alt="docling — ranked #1 in Documents on Top Agent Skills"></a>

Head-to-head

docling vs the alternatives

Skill FAQ

About docling

What is the docling skill?

Use Docling to understand the content of documents in any supported format — PDF (born-digital or scanned), DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, Markdown, AsciiDoc, CSV, images, audio, and XML — by converting them into a unified DoclingDocument (Markdown or structured JSON). Use whenever you need to read, parse, convert, extract, or chunk a document you cannot read directly: "what's in this PDF", "convert this to markdown", "extract the tables", "chunk this for RAG", "read this scanned document", "parse this DOCX/PPTX". Covers the docling CLI, the Python SDK, the remote Service Client, and the docling-slim install extras.

Which agents does docling work with?

Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI.

How do I install docling?

Run `pip install docling && uvx library-skills --claude` for Claude Code. See the install panel for per-agent commands.

Is docling free to use?

Yes — docling is open source (MIT).

Who maintains docling?

docling is published by Docling project (LF AI & Data) and was last updated on 2026-08-14.

What is docling best for?

Reading or converting documents the agent cannot open directly, at 65K stars and MIT: scanned PDFs, Office formats, tables, and chunking a corpus for retrieval.