wtf is doc7?

doc7 is a command line tool that converts documents into clean, well organized text that AI tools can search and reason over. It works with PDFs, Office files like Word documents, scanned pages, screenshots, charts, formulas, and diagrams, turning all of them into a single text format called Markdown, which is a simple way of writing formatted text using plain characters. Unlike traditional document conversion tools that mainly extract text character by character, doc7 uses a vision capable AI model to actually look at each page the way a person would, reading tables, understanding chart relationships, and interpreting diagrams, even on pages that have no selectable text at all, such as a scanned image. You bring your own AI model, either running locally through tools like LM Studio or Ollama, or a remote service, as long as it speaks the common OpenAI compatible format. There is no required text recognition software and no per page fee charged by doc7 itself. The project includes a benchmark comparing its output against two other document conversion tools on a set of scanned pages with fifteen checkable facts. In that test, doc7 correctly recovered all fifteen facts, while the two comparison tools recovered nine and three respectively. Beyond simple conversion, doc7 also includes a chat mode, a small assistant running on your configured local model that can hold a conversation and, when you explicitly ask it to process a file, convert that file into Markdown as part of the chat. It can also help set up your local model configuration in plain language and includes safety limits so it can only browse a restricted set of folders and never runs arbitrary system commands. Installing doc7 does not require administrator privileges and works on macOS, Linux, and Windows. Once installed, it automatically finds any local vision model server already running on your machine and lets you pick which model to use. This project is licensed under the MIT license, a permissive license that allows free use, modification, and commercial use. doc7 is aimed at developers and technical users who want to feed documents into AI systems, particularly those who prefer running everything locally rather than sending files to a cloud service.