> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.doman.id/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Docling basic guide

# `docling` Basic Usage Guide

This guide provides a basic overview of how to use the `docling` command-line tool to convert and process your documents.

## Activating the Environment

Before you can use `docling`, you need to activate the virtual environment you created during installation:

```sh theme={null}
source ~/docling-venv/bin/activate
```

## Basic Conversion

The most common use case for `docling` is to convert a document from one format to another. The basic syntax is as follows:

```sh theme={null}
docling convert <input_file> <output_file>
```

**Example:**

To convert a PDF file named `my_document.pdf` to a Microsoft Word document, you would run the following command:

```sh theme={null}
docling convert my_document.pdf my_document.docx
```

`docling` will automatically detect the input and output formats based on the file extensions.

## Specifying Output Format

You can also explicitly specify the output format using the `--format` or `-f` option. This is useful if you want to convert a file to a format that does not have a standard file extension.

**Example:**

To convert a PDF file to plain text, you can use the following command:

```sh theme={null}
docling convert my_document.pdf my_document.txt -f text
```

## Getting Help

`docling` provides a comprehensive help menu that lists all available commands and options. To access the help menu, you can run the following command:

```sh theme={null}
docling --help
```

You can also get help for specific commands by running the command followed by the `--help` flag.

**Example:**

To get help for the `convert` command, you can run:

```sh theme={null}
docling convert --help
```

This will provide you with a detailed description of the `convert` command and all of its available options.