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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteDocling can miss a table, merge table cells, scramble page columns, or assign every PDF heading level 1 for different reasons. Start by identifying which stage failed: OCR, layout detection, table structure, reading order, or heading hierarchy. Then change only the relevant setting and compare the result with the source page.
First identify what Docling got wrong
Docling processes documents through distinct stages. Layout detection identifies regions such as text, tables, pictures, and section headers; OCR supplies text when a usable PDF text layer is absent; table-structure recognition reconstructs cells within detected table regions; later stages handle reading order and heading hierarchy. A setting for one stage will not necessarily fix another.
- No table region detected: investigate layout detection and the page content, not just table reconstruction.
- A table is detected but its cells are wrong: test table structure mode and cell matching.
- Prose flows across page columns: investigate reading order, not table settings.
- Headings are recognized but all have the same depth: enable heading hierarchy inference.
- Text is missing or garbled: check whether the PDF has a reliable text layer and whether OCR is needed.
Docling’s model catalog describes separate layout, OCR, and table-recognition components, including TableFormer fast and accurate modes and OCR options such as Tesseract, EasyOCR, RapidOCR, macOS Vision, and SuryaOCR. Availability depends on the installed release and environment.
Why Docling misses a table
Check whether the page has usable text
Determine whether the PDF is digitally generated, scanned, or mixed. Compare extracted text with the visible page. If text is missing or garbled, check OCR availability and language configuration for the affected pages. OCR is not automatically beneficial for a digital PDF with a sound text layer. Inspect OCR results against the original, especially for small type, symbols, and dense numeric tables.
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Check whether layout detected a table region
Table structure recognition works on regions supplied by layout analysis. If the visible table was not identified as a table, changing the table reconstruction mode cannot reliably recover it. Inspect the page representation and determine whether the region was labeled as a table before adjusting structure settings.
For a detected but poorly reconstructed table, use accurate mode
Docling’s advanced options documentation describes TableFormer accurate mode as the default and intended for difficult table structures; fast mode trades some accuracy for speed. Defaults may differ in older or customized pipelines, so check the configuration for your installed release. Accurate mode can help with structure reconstruction, but it does not guarantee a correct result or fix a table region that layout analysis missed.
For merged columns inside a table, test cell matching
By default, Docling maps recognized table structure back to PDF cells. The documentation says disabling cell matching can improve cases where multiple table columns merge. Compare both outputs on the affected page:
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pipeline_options.table_structure_options.do_cell_matching = FalseThis setting concerns cells inside an extracted table. It is not a general fix for text flowing across ordinary page columns.
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A Docling project discussion records a maintainer explanation that post-processing removes fully empty rows and columns because they may be prediction anomalies; a June 2025 reply reported that behavior still occurring. Do not assume accurate mode preserves an intentionally empty column. Compare the exported table with the source in the exact release you use.
Why prose columns are read in the wrong order
Newspaper-style or multi-column page text is a reading-order problem, not necessarily a table problem. Enabling table structure or disabling cell matching does not ensure that prose is read down one column before moving to the next.
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Docling’s rule-based reading-order stage can use visible PDF rules as signals and is enabled by default. If rules separating columns or horizontal bands appear to disrupt ordering, test disabling those separators:
pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions(use_reading_order_separators=False)The CLI equivalent is --no-reading-order-separators. The documentation says this option changes ordering only. A Docling issue filed for version 2.43.0 describes text flowing across columns in a three-column financial document, despite table-related settings. It is an example of a reported failure, not evidence that all current versions behave the same way.
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Why PDF headings are all level 1
Detecting a section header and determining its place in a hierarchy are separate tasks. Docling’s layout model can mark a block as a section header without deciding whether it is, for example, a top-level heading or a subsection. The advanced options documentation explains that this is why PDF headings are level 1 by default.
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Enable heading hierarchy inference in the PDF pipeline:
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import HeadingHierarchyOptions, PdfPipelineOptions
pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions()
pipeline_options.heading_hierarchy_options = HeadingHierarchyOptions(enabled=True)
pipeline_options.generate_parsed_pages = TrueThe hierarchy stage infers levels using PDF bookmarks first, then heading numbering, then visual style such as size, weight, slant, and case. It changes section-header levels; it does not add or reorder document content. Parsed pages are needed for font-style inference.
Scanned pages have a limitation: OCR does not provide font weight or slant metadata, so visual-style inference ranks headings by size alone. Bookmarks or numbering can still provide separate signals when present. Review inferred levels against the page instead of assuming a scan preserves all the styling cues of a digital PDF. See the heading-level documentation for the configuration and inference details.
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Minimal PDF configurations to compare
These examples reflect the documented API, but names and defaults can change. Check the documentation for your installed Docling release before using them in a production pipeline.
Difficult table structure
from docling.datamodel.base_models import InputFormat
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import PdfPipelineOptions, TableFormerMode
from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter, PdfFormatOption
pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions(do_table_structure=True)
pipeline_options.table_structure_options.mode = TableFormerMode.ACCURATE
converter = DocumentConverter(
format_options={InputFormat.PDF: PdfFormatOption(pipeline_options=pipeline_options)}
)Heading hierarchy
from docling.datamodel.pipeline_options import HeadingHierarchyOptions, PdfPipelineOptions
pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions()
pipeline_options.heading_hierarchy_options = HeadingHierarchyOptions(enabled=True)
pipeline_options.generate_parsed_pages = TrueVisible rules disrupting reading order
pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions(use_reading_order_separators=False)Validate the fix against the page
Review the same affected pages after each targeted change. Compare the visible page with extracted text, table cells, reading order, and heading levels as separate outputs. For important documents, keep representative pages as a regression sample so you can check whether a configuration change or upgrade alters results.
Docling documents parsed-page and image controls for inspecting the underlying page representation. If you consider another OCR or document-parsing approach for pages that remain unreliable, compare it on the same representative pages: check support for the document type and OCR languages, treatment of page columns versus tables, handling of merged cells and blank columns, traceability to page regions, and whether processing is local or remote. Docling’s documentation says remote OCR and hosted-model use is explicitly opt-in; decide whether that data flow is appropriate for the documents before enabling a remote service.
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