yolowpdf: a PDF-to-Markdown parser written from scratch in Rust β plus its own OCR engine
PDF parsing in Rust usually means wrapping a C library. yolowpdf reads the file format itself: no Poppler, no MuPDF, no native PDF library at all.
It is the PDF engine extracted from PageSift (from the 1.2.4 tree), now an independent MIT-licensed workspace. It is also the second spin-off in a week, after yolow64 .
Why it exists
PageSift needed to turn PDFs found in the wild into clean Markdown without installing a native PDF stack on every machine. Wild PDFs are not clean: broken xref tables, object streams, encrypted streams, CID fonts with no ToUnicode map, multi-column layouts, tables, inline formulas, images, and scanned pages with no text layer at all.
Handling all of that grew into a standalone reader: file structure and damaged-file repair, fonts (Type1, TrueType, CFF, CID, predefined CMaps, CJK collections without ToUnicode), layout reconstruction (paragraphs, headings, reading order, headers/footers,β¦
