【2026】MinerU Complete Guide: The Best OSS Tool That Converts PDF, Word & Excel to Markdown

「Reading this contract took me 3 days…」「I'm so tired of opening invoice PDFs one by one and transcribing them into Excel.」「A survey of 50 papers won't finish in 2 weeks.»

These are the daily cries of paperwork.

In 2026, AI has automated code and design — yet oddly, the task of simply processing PDFs and Words is still done by hand by most people.

The reason is simple: until now, there was no free tool that handled the unglamorous, difficult job of "converting documents into structured data."

MinerU changes that.

A 500-page complex contract becomes perfect Markdown in 90 seconds. Tables become HTML, formulas become LaTeX, and scanned documents get OCR in 109 languages. All free, open source, and runs on your own PC.

In this article:

What MinerU is / why it earned 68,000+ GitHub stars
How to convert PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint & images to Markdown/JSON
Industry-specific use cases (legal, accounting, research, education, government)
4 ways to use it: pip / Docker / WebUI / CLI
Comparison with other PDF conversion tools
A complete guide from installation to production

GitHub: github.com/opendatalab/MinerU

Bottom Line: MinerU Changes Document Processing

Item	Detail
Developer	OpenDataLab (Shanghai AI Laboratory)
GitHub Stars	69,800+ ⭐ (5,900+ forks)
License	MinerU Open Source License (Apache 2.0-based, commercial use OK)
Formats	PDF / DOCX / PPTX / XLSX / images (JPG/PNG etc.)
Output	Markdown / JSON (multimodal & NLP)
OCR languages	109 languages (Japanese, English, Chinese, etc.)
Math conversion	LaTeX output
Table conversion	HTML output, supports merging tables across pages
Platforms	Windows / Linux / macOS (CPU-only OK)
Speed	200-page document parsed in ~90 seconds (pipeline mode)

What Is MinerU? — A High-Precision Document Parsing Engine from Shanghai AI Lab

MinerU is an open-source document parsing tool developed by OpenDataLab (Shanghai AI Laboratory).

It was originally created to solve symbol conversion problems in academic papers and technical documents for the lab's LLM InternLM pretraining. Since then it has grown into an all-in-one tool that converts PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images into Markdown or JSON with high precision.

Why Did It Earn 69,800 GitHub Stars?

The reason is simple: a document parsing tool this accurate is available for free.

More accurate than Adobe Acrobat Pro's export
More precise than commercial PDF conversion APIs, with 109-language support
100% local operation, zero data-leak risk
One-command install: pip install

What Can It Do? — Key Features

1. High-Precision Structure Preservation

Layout analysis: distinguishes headings, body, footnotes, page numbers
Reading order: reconstructs the correct reading order
Formula → LaTeX: math formulas become editable LaTeX
Table → HTML: tables become structured HTML (including multi-page tables)

2. 109-Language OCR

Scanned documents (images) converted to text via OCR
109 languages including Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, etc.

3. Multimodal Output

In addition to Markdown, outputs JSON with multimodal (image + text) and NLP annotations
Ideal for RAG and AI training data

4. Multi-Format Input

PDF / DOCX / PPTX / XLSX / images — no need to convert Word to PDF first

How to Use It — 4 Ways

① pip (easiest)

pip install mineru
mineru -p input.pdf -o output/

② Docker

docker pull opendatalab/mineru:latest
docker run --gpus all -it --rm --ipc=host \
  -v ./input:/input -v ./output:/output \
  opendatalab/mineru:latest \
  mineru -p /input/document.pdf -o /output/

③ WebUI (no install)

Try it at mineru.net
Upload a document and get Markdown in seconds

④ CLI (batch processing)

# Process a directory
mineru -p ./documents/ -o ./output/

# With OCR for scanned documents
mineru -p ./scan.pdf -o ./output/ --ocr

Industry-Specific Use Cases

Industry	Use Case
Legal	Convert contracts & judgments to Markdown for full-text search
Accounting	Batch-convert invoices & statements to structured data
Research	Survey papers as LaTeX/Markdown for literature management
Education	Digitize textbooks & scanned materials
Government	Digitize paper documents for internal systems
AI/RAG	Preprocess internal documents for private RAG search

FAQ

Q: Can it handle Word and Excel too?

Yes. It supports DOCX / PPTX / XLSX. No more "Word → PDF → convert" double work — parse directly.

Q: What's different from other PDF conversion tools?

The biggest difference is multi-format support and structure-preservation accuracy. Especially the combination of formulas (LaTeX), tables (HTML), and 109-language OCR — strengths other open-source tools don't have.

Q: Can I use it for RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)?

This is one of its strongest use cases. It natively integrates with major RAG frameworks: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Dify, FastGPT, RAGFlow. Convert internal documents to Markdown with MinerU and feed them to RAG to build a fully private document-search AI.

Q: Is a GPU required?

No. Pipeline mode runs on CPU alone. For hybrid mode requiring higher precision, a GPU (8GB+ VRAM) is needed.

Q: Is my data sent externally?

No. MinerU is fully local. Documents are never sent outside. Even confidential documents are safe.

Summary: Free Yourself from Paperwork

MinerU is the tool to "make the time spent on paperwork zero."

500-page contract → 4 minutes 200 invoices → 12 minutes 50 papers → half a day

And there's also a no-install web app, so you can try it casually first.

Recommended for:

Legal / accounting teams processing large numbers of PDFs
Researchers losing time to paper surveys
People building RAG but stuck on document preprocessing
Municipalities & educational institutions digitizing paper documents
Anyone handling multilingual documents including Japanese

Start with the web demo.

Web demo: mineru.net GitHub: github.com/opendatalab/MinerU

Once you use it, you'll be amazed at its power.