haiku.rag/docs/configuration/processing.md

Document Processing & Monitoring

This guide covers how haiku.rag converts, chunks, and monitors documents.

Document Processing

Configure how documents are converted and chunked:

processing:
  # Chunking configuration
  chunk_size: 256                            # Maximum tokens per chunk

  # Converter selection
  converter: docling-local                   # docling-local or docling-serve

  # Chunker selection and configuration
  chunker: docling-local                     # docling-local or docling-serve
  chunker_type: hybrid                       # hybrid or hierarchical
  chunking_tokenizer: "Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B"  # HuggingFace model for tokenization
  chunking_merge_peers: true                 # Merge undersized successive chunks
  chunking_use_markdown_tables: false        # Use markdown tables vs narrative format

  # Automatic title generation
  auto_title: false                          # Auto-generate titles on ingestion
  title_model:                               # LLM for title generation (fallback)
    provider: ollama
    name: gpt-oss
    enable_thinking: false

  # Conversion options (works with both local and remote converters)
  conversion_options:
    # OCR settings
    do_ocr: true                             # Enable OCR for bitmap content
    force_ocr: false                         # Replace existing text with OCR
    ocr_engine: auto                         # OCR engine: auto, easyocr, rapidocr, tesseract, tesserocr, ocrmac
    ocr_lang: []                             # OCR languages (e.g., ["en", "fr", "de"])

    # Table extraction
    do_table_structure: true                 # Extract table structure
    table_mode: accurate                     # fast or accurate
    table_cell_matching: true                # Match table cells back to PDF cells

    # Image settings
    images_scale: 2.0                        # Image scale factor
    generate_page_images: true               # Include rendered page images (for visualize_chunk)

    # VLM picture description (off by default; see "Picture Handling" below)
    picture_description:
      enabled: false
      model:
        provider: ollama
        name: ministral-3

Conversion Options

The conversion_options section allows fine-grained control over document conversion. These options work with both docling-local and docling-serve converters.

OCR Settings

conversion_options:
  do_ocr: true          # Enable OCR for bitmap/scanned content
  force_ocr: false      # Replace all text with OCR output
  ocr_engine: auto      # OCR engine selection
  ocr_lang: []          # List of OCR languages, e.g., ["en", "fr", "de"]

• do_ocr: When true, applies OCR to images and scanned pages. Disable for faster processing if documents contain only native text.
• force_ocr: When true, replaces existing text layers with OCR output. Useful for documents with poor text extraction.
• ocr_engine: Select the OCR engine to use. Options:
  • auto (default): Automatically select the best available engine
  • easyocr: EasyOCR - supports many languages, good accuracy
  • rapidocr: RapidOCR - fast processing
  • tesseract: Tesseract OCR
  • tesserocr: Tesseract via tesserocr Python binding
  • ocrmac: macOS native OCR (macOS only)
• ocr_lang: List of language codes for OCR. Empty list uses default language detection. Examples: ["en"], ["en", "fr", "de"].

Table Extraction

conversion_options:
  do_table_structure: true    # Extract structured table data
  table_mode: accurate        # fast or accurate
  table_cell_matching: true   # Match cells back to PDF

• do_table_structure: When true, extracts table structure. Disable for faster processing if tables aren't important.
• table_mode:
  • accurate: Better table structure recognition (slower)
  • fast: Faster processing with simpler table detection
• table_cell_matching: When true, matches detected table cells back to PDF cells. Disable if tables have merged cells across columns.

Image Settings

conversion_options:
  images_scale: 2.0               # Image resolution scale factor
  generate_page_images: true      # Include rendered page images

• images_scale: Scale factor for extracted images. Higher values = better quality but larger size. Typical range: 1.0-3.0.
• generate_page_images: When true (default), rendered images of each PDF page are included in the document. Required for visualize_chunk() to show visual grounding. When false, page images are excluded to reduce document size.

Picture Handling

Picture bytes (figures, diagrams) are always extracted and stored in document_items.picture_data for every ingested document. The single configurable knob is whether a Vision Language Model (VLM) runs at ingest to generate textual descriptions:

processing:
  conversion_options:
    picture_description:
      enabled: true              # default false
      model:
        provider: ollama         # any OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions provider
        name: ministral-3
      timeout: 90
      max_tokens: 200

When enabled: true, each picture's description is woven into the chunk text and is searchable via FTS. The prompt is configurable under prompts.picture_description — see Prompts.

Switching the VLM on or off on an existing database doesn't require reingesting (the bytes are already there):

• Off → on: haiku-rag rebuild --descriptions runs the VLM over stored bytes and re-chunks. Skips the docling parse entirely.
• On → off: haiku-rag rebuild --rechunk recomposes chunk text from the stripped docling blob without descriptions.

When using converter: docling-serve, the VLM is invoked from docling-serve rather than haiku.rag — see Remote processing.

Pictures × embedder × QA model: how the pieces compose

Three independent settings drive ingest, retrieval, and QA:

Setting	Question it answers	Values
picture_description.enabled	Should a VLM weave descriptions into chunk text at ingest?	false (default) / true
embeddings.model.provider	Can the embedder index image content?	text-only (ollama, openai, cohere, sentence-transformers) vs vllm (multimodal)
qa.model.vision	Can the QA model interpret images?	false (default) / true

Picture bytes are always stored, regardless of these settings.

What gets stored by enabled × embedder:

enabled	Embedder	Text chunks	Synthetic picture chunks
false	text-only	text only (caption/surrounding)	none
false	multimodal	text only	one per picture, vector = image embedding
true	text-only	text + descriptions	none
true	multimodal	text + descriptions	one per picture, vector = image embedding

What QA receives at search time:

• qa.model.vision: false — text chunks only (descriptions, when present, answer figure questions in prose).
• qa.model.vision: true — text chunks + raw picture bytes via BinaryContent; the model reads figures directly.

qa.model.vision is independent of ingestion — flipping it never requires reingesting. Setting vision: true against a text-only model causes silent acceptance and confabulation on Ollama and a 400 on OpenAI; default false is the safe choice.

Recommended combinations:

Use case	picture_description.enabled	Embedder	qa.model.vision
Pure text RAG, no figures	false	text-only	false
Text RAG, figures answered through descriptions	true	text-only	false
Vision QA on figure-rich docs (no cross-modal search)	true or false	text-only	true
Cross-modal search + vision QA	true or false	multimodal	true
Cross-modal search, text QA only	true	multimodal	false

Automatic Title Generation

Enable automatic title generation during document ingestion:

processing:
  auto_title: true
  title_model:
    provider: ollama
    name: gpt-oss
    enable_thinking: false

When auto_title is enabled, haiku.rag attempts to extract a title for each document during ingestion using a two-tier approach:

1. Structural extraction (free, no model calls): Scans the DoclingDocument for semantic labels — HTML <title> tags, <h1> headings, PDF title blocks, and section headers
2. LLM fallback: When no structural title is found (e.g., plain text), generates a title using the configured title_model

Priority order: HTML <title> (furniture layer) → h1/PDF title (body layer) → first section header → LLM generation.

Explicit titles passed via title= parameter always take precedence and are never overridden. When updating documents, existing titles are preserved — auto-generation only applies to untitled documents.

To generate titles for existing untitled documents, use rebuild --title-only.

Local vs Remote Processing

Local processing (default):

• Uses docling library locally
• No external dependencies
• Good for development and small workloads

Remote processing (docling-serve):

• Offloads processing to docling-serve API
• Better for heavy workloads and production
• Requires docling-serve instance (see Remote processing setup)

To use remote processing:

processing:
  converter: docling-serve
  chunker: docling-serve

providers:
  docling_serve:
    base_url: http://localhost:5001
    api_key: "your-api-key"  # Optional

Conversion options work identically for both local and remote processing.

Note: When using chunker: docling-serve, OCR options (do_ocr, force_ocr, ocr_engine, ocr_lang) from conversion_options are passed to the chunking API. This is useful when running docling-serve in a read-only container where OCR model downloads fail—set do_ocr: false to disable OCR entirely.

Chunking Strategies

Hybrid chunking (default):

• Structure-aware chunking
• Respects document boundaries
• Best for most use cases

Hierarchical chunking:

• Creates hierarchical chunk structure
• Preserves document hierarchy
• Useful for complex documents

Table Serialization

Control how tables are represented in chunks:

processing:
  chunking_use_markdown_tables: false  # Default: narrative format

• false: Tables as narrative text ("Value A, Column 2 = Value B")
• true: Tables as markdown (preserves table structure)

Chunk Size

processing:
  chunk_size: 256  # Maximum tokens per chunk

Context expansion settings (for enriching search results with surrounding content) are configured in the search section. See Search Settings.

File Monitoring

Set directories to monitor for automatic indexing:

monitor:
  directories:
    - /path/to/documents
    - /another_path/to/documents

Filtering Monitored Files

Use gitignore-style patterns to control which files are monitored:

monitor:
  directories:
    - /path/to/documents

  # Exclude specific files or directories
  ignore_patterns:
    - "*draft*"         # Ignore files with "draft" in the name
    - "temp/"           # Ignore temp directory
    - "**/archive/**"   # Ignore all archive directories
    - "*.backup"        # Ignore backup files

  # Only include specific files (whitelist mode)
  include_patterns:
    - "*.md"            # Only markdown files
    - "*.pdf"           # Only PDF files
    - "**/docs/**"      # Only files in docs directories

How patterns work:

1. Extension filtering - Only supported file types are considered
2. Include patterns - If specified, only matching files are included (whitelist)
3. Ignore patterns - Matching files are excluded (blacklist)
4. Combining both - Include patterns are applied first, then ignore patterns

Common patterns:

# Only monitor markdown documentation, but ignore drafts
monitor:
  include_patterns:
    - "*.md"
  ignore_patterns:
    - "*draft*"
    - "*WIP*"

# Monitor all supported files except in specific directories
monitor:
  ignore_patterns:
    - "node_modules/"
    - ".git/"
    - "**/test/**"
    - "**/temp/**"

Patterns follow gitignore syntax:

• * matches anything except /
• ** matches zero or more directories
• ? matches any single character
• [abc] matches any character in the set