firecrawl parse Turn a local document into clean markdown on disk. Supports PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, HTML/HTM/XHTML . When to use You have a file on disk (not a URL) and want its text as markdown User drops a PDF/DOCX and asks what it says, or to summarize it Use scrape instead when the source is a URL Quick start Always save to .firecrawl/ with -o — parsed docs can be hundreds of KB and blow up context if streamed to stdout. Add .firecrawl/ to .gitignore . mkdir -p .firecrawl

File → markdown

firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -o .firecrawl/paper.md

AI summary

firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -S -o .firecrawl/paper-summary.md

Ask a question about the doc

firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -Q "What are the main conclusions?" \ -o .firecrawl/paper-qa.md Then head , grep , rg etc., or incrementally read the file - don't load the whole thing at once. Options Option Description -S, --summary AI-generated summary -Q, --query Ask a question about the parsed content -o, --output Output file path — always use this -f, --format markdown (default), html , summary --timeout Timeout for the parse job --timing Show request duration Tips Quote paths with spaces: firecrawl parse "./My Doc.pdf" -o .firecrawl/mydoc.md . Max upload size: 50 MB per file. Credits: ~1 per PDF page; HTML is 1 flat. Check .firecrawl/ before re-parsing the same file. To check your credit balance (recommended for batch processing and similar workflows), use the firecrawl credit-usage command. See also firecrawl-scrape — same idea for URLs