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docling Basic Usage Guide

This guide provides a basic overview of how to use the docling command-line tool to convert and process your documents.

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Activating the Environment

Before you can use docling, you need to activate the virtual environment you created during installation: 
source ~/docling-venv/bin/activate

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Basic Conversion

The most common use case for docling is to convert a document from one format to another. The basic syntax is as follows: 
docling convert <input_file> <output_file>
Example: To convert a PDF file named my_document.pdf to a Microsoft Word document, you would run the following command: 
docling convert my_document.pdf my_document.docx
docling will automatically detect the input and output formats based on the file extensions.

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Specifying Output Format

You can also explicitly specify the output format using the --format or -f option. This is useful if you want to convert a file to a format that does not have a standard file extension. Example: To convert a PDF file to plain text, you can use the following command: 
docling convert my_document.pdf my_document.txt -f text

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Getting Help

docling provides a comprehensive help menu that lists all available commands and options. To access the help menu, you can run the following command: 
docling --help
You can also get help for specific commands by running the command followed by the --help flag. Example: To get help for the convert command, you can run: 
docling convert --help
This will provide you with a detailed description of the convert command and all of its available options.