Wrapping Docling in a Reusable Text Extraction Pipeline
· 12 min read

Docling already does most of what a batch text-extraction harness does: it iterates over documents, swaps OCR backends, handles per-document errors, and exports structured output. So the code worth writing for the soviet.recipes project is a thin pipeline around Docling that adds the three things Docling leaves to me: image preprocessing before extraction, a neutral slot for engines Docling does not wrap, and consistent scoring across every approach I test. So far I've built the engine slot and the batch loop that drives it; preprocessing and scoring are designed but not written yet.
