DocCraft

A cross-platform PDF → Markdown, Image → Markdown, and Markdown → Excel desktop converter built with Tauri 2, React, TypeScript, shadcn/ui and pdf-inspector (Firecrawl's pure-Rust PDF classification / extraction engine). The UI is bilingual — English (default) and Simplified Chinese — switchable at runtime.

Detailed architecture & data-flow docs: docs/index.md

Screenshots

Features

PDF → Markdown

• Hybrid text + OCR — text pages extracted locally by pdf-inspector; scanned / image-only pages rendered to PNG and sent to a configured OCR provider (remote AI vision or local PaddleOCR), then reassembled in document order.
• Smart PDF routing — each PDF is classified (~10–50ms) as TextBased / Scanned / ImageBased / Mixed with the exact list of pages needing OCR. Pure-text PDFs never touch the network.
• Configurable OCR providers — any OpenAI-chat-completions-compatible vision API (multiple vendors, multiple models per vendor) or the built-in local PaddleOCR engine. API keys are encrypted at rest (DPAPI on Windows) and never exposed to the frontend. A unified OCR mode selector offers five options: ForceLocal, ForceAi, NonTextLocal, NonTextAi, Disabled.
• Graceful OCR fallback — when no OCR provider is available, conversion still completes: pages needing OCR are skipped with <!-- OCR skipped --> comments. Per-page failures degrade to <!-- OCR failed --> comments. A bell icon in the status bar collects these as structured notices with clickable page chips and retry actions.
• Draw-a-table extraction — manually draw vertical separators over a rendered PDF page to define table regions, then extract them into Markdown. Supports undo/redo, per-page lines, "apply to all pages" mode, and OCR fallback for scanned pages (local PaddleOCR or remote AI vision with drawn-line hints).
• Batch queue — drag & drop many PDFs, worker-pool conversion with a user-configurable concurrency limit (1–16), retry / remove / export-all.
• Editor workspace — toolbar (convert), split view (PDF preview | Markdown preview), status bar (type / pages / confidence / OCR needs / notices bell).

Image → Markdown

• Dedicated workspace tab accepting PNG / JPEG images via drag & drop or file picker, with deduplicated list and thumbnails.
• Each image is recognized by the OCR engine selected by the current OCR mode (local PaddleOCR or remote AI vision).
• Results are previewed as a merged GFM document and can be exported per-image or merged into a single .md file.
• Draw-table on images — imported images can be opened in a draw-table overlay where you draw vertical lines, then the image + line positions are sent to the backend for column-based extraction (local PaddleOCR text blocks
  • column cutting, or AI vision with line hints, depending on the OCR mode).

Markdown → Excel

• Drop or pick .md files; each is parsed for GitHub-Flavored Markdown tables.
• Inline table preview with table/row counts, single or bulk export to .xlsx.
• Configurable tables-only mode: exports only GFM tables; when off, the whole document content is written into the workbook.
• Each table is labeled with its source PDF page (Page N) when produced by this app's PDF conversion.

Performance & memory

• Per-page OCR streaming — the frontend renders and uploads one page at a time; peak memory stays at a single page image instead of the whole document.
• Virtualized PDF preview — only pages near the scroll viewport are rendered to canvas; off-screen bitmaps are released.
• Lazy Markdown / Excel preview — paginated rendering and windowed rows for large documents.
• State-preserving tabs — switching between tabs keeps every view mounted (hidden, not unmounted), so loaded files, results and queues survive tab switches.

System tray

• System tray icon with right-click menu (Open, Start Screenshot, Exit) and left-click to show the main window. Close button hides to tray instead of quitting. Configurable in Settings.

Getting Started

Prerequisites: Node ≥ 20, pnpm ≥ 10, Rust ≥ 1.85.

pnpm install       # install frontend deps
pnpm tauri dev     # run the desktop app (HMR + debug build)

Useful checks:

pnpm exec tsc --noEmit               # frontend type check
pnpm build                           # frontend production build
cargo check --manifest-path src-tauri/Cargo.toml

Configuration

• ocr-config.json — per-vendor name, base URL, protected API key, models.
• app-settings.json — maxConcurrent, cacheExtractedText, excelTablesOnly, ocrMode, screenshotHotkey, enableTray, textSeparator.

License

MIT