Gemini Document Processing

Delegate document processing to Gemini CLI for superior multimodal understanding. Use when documents have visual complexity - layouts, tables, diagrams, scans, mixed content.

Basic Usage

Reference file paths directly in your prompt - Gemini reads them via its file system tools:

gemini "Convert this to markdown: /path/to/document.pdf"

# Save output
gemini "Convert to markdown: /path/to/doc.pdf" > output.md

Common Tasks

Faithful Conversion:

gemini "Convert this PDF to clean markdown. Preserve all content including headers, lists, tables. Output only markdown, no commentary: /path/to/document.pdf"

Table Extraction:

gemini "Extract all tables as markdown tables: /path/to/document.pdf"

Structured Extraction:

gemini "Extract and structure as markdown:
- [list the fields you want]
- [be specific about format]
File: /path/to/document.pdf"

Diagram/Image Description:

gemini "Describe the diagrams and figures in this document: /path/to/document.pdf"

When to Use Gemini vs Other Tools

Use Gemini:

• Scanned documents / OCR needed
• Complex layouts (multi-column, mixed content)
• Tables, diagrams, charts
• Handwritten content
• Image-heavy documents

Use pypdf/pdfplumber:

• Simple text-only PDFs
• Programmatic batch processing
• When you need raw text extraction without interpretation