> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://globalfeed.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Firecrawl's anydoc gains OCR, so scanned documents also turn into machine-readable text
- URL: https://globalfeed.ai/en/firecrawls-anydoc-gains-ocr-so-scanned-documents-also-turn-into-machine-readable-text/
- Published: 2026-08-28T04:39:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-30T15:27:31.000Z
- Description: The MIT-licensed Rust library converts 14 document formats to Markdown. With OCR added, scanned pages are in scope too, at a reported median of 190 milliseconds per page.
- Author: GlobalFeed Editor
- Tags: Firecrawl, anydoc, open source, OCR, document processing, x-firecrawl, dil-en, elle

Firecrawl has added optical character recognition to **anydoc**, its open-source document converter. The library can now turn not only digital documents but **scanned pages** into text.

anydoc is a library written in Rust, and its job fits in one sentence: it takes a document and converts it to **clean Markdown**. The 14 supported formats include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV and PDF. The output is not flat text; headings, links, lists, tables, footnotes and equations as LaTeX are preserved.

Why it matters: when language models and agents want to read a corporate archive, format is the first obstacle. A folder mixing PDFs, Word files and scans is not something a model can digest directly. anydoc handles that intermediate layer and produces Markdown, the format models work with most comfortably.

The speed figures the company gives: a median of **4.4 milliseconds** for documents that need no OCR, and **190 milliseconds** for scanned pages that do. Layout detection, table and formula extraction also work on the OCR side.

There are three ways to use it: from the command line (`npx @firecrawl/anydoc document.docx -o output.md`), as an npm, pip or Rust package, and as a WebAssembly build that runs in the browser. The library is **MIT licensed**, so commercial use is open. OCR runs as a hosted service through Firecrawl Parse; the company says no signup is required and that an API key only raises the limits. There is an important distinction here: anydoc does not perform OCR locally. It sends the document it detects as scanned; and only that one; to Firecrawl Parse; the rest of the conversion never leaves the machine. For a corporate archive, that distinction means knowing exactly which documents go out.

**Local OCR is coming.** Firecrawl engineer Abimael Martell has announced that local OCR is available in anydoc and pdf-inspector, with a fast classification engine deciding which pages go to OCR. That capability is not in a published release yet: the latest version on both npm and GitHub is 0.2.4, whose notes describe hosted OCR. Once local OCR ships, scanned pages will be readable without the document leaving the machine; the step that actually matters for corporate archives.

The source is [on GitHub](https://github.com/firecrawl/anydoc?ref=globalfeed.ai).