Docling

Kotaemon provides a Docling reader to enable local document ingestion with structure-aware parsing, including text, tables, and figures. The reader is located under kotaemon/loaders/docling_loader.

Prerequisites

• Install Docling:

uv pip install -e "libs/kotaemon[docling]"

• Configure optional figure captioning:

Docling can generate figure captions when a VLM endpoint is available. Set KH_VLM_ENDPOINT in your .env file or application settings to enable captioning.

KH_VLM_ENDPOINT=http://your-vlm-endpoint

If KH_VLM_ENDPOINT is not set, Docling will still extract text, tables, and figure metadata, but it will skip generated figure captions.

Configure the loader

1. Run Kotaemon and open the app UI.
2. Navigate to Settings → Retrieval Settings → File loader.
3. Select Docling (figure+table extraction).
4. Save the settings, then upload or ingest a document. Kotaemon will use Docling during indexing and convert extracted content into Document objects.