sugo

Sugo turns PDFs, Office files, screenshots and images into clean, compact Markdown for RAG systems, AI agents and LLM chats. It removes what only costs tokens (repeated headers and footers, page numbers, hidden text, tracking parameters, app chrome around a screenshot) and keeps the content, the tables and the structure. Everything runs on your computer: no cloud API, no telemetry, nothing sent anywhere.

In Italian, il sugo del discorso means "the gist", and a sugo is a sauce you reduce until only the concentrated flavour remains. That is what Sugo does to your documents.

What it does

A small generated three-page PDF, as a plain text extractor gives it to your model (pages 1 and 3 look the same):

ACME S.p.A. - Annual Report 2025                Confidential
3.2 Revenue
Revenue grew by 12% in the second half, driven by the export market.
Details: https://acme.example/report?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email
Page 14 of 120

What sugo report.pdf prints:

ACME S.p.A. - Annual Report 2025

# 3.1 Costs

Costs fell by 3% thanks to the new suppliers.
Details: https://acme.example/report

# 3.2 Revenue

Revenue grew by 12% in the second half, driven by the export market.
Details: https://acme.example/report

# 3.3 Outlook

The board expects stable growth next year.
Details: https://acme.example/report

The header is kept once instead of on every page; the page numbers, the repeated "Confidential" and the tracking parameters are gone; the text is the same. sugo stats measures the difference: 180 → 97 tokens, 46% saved on this small generated example; real documents with less page furniture save much less (see below). Every removal is recorded with the cleaner that made it and the reason, so you can always check what was dropped. Text that cannot be read is marked as illegible, and handwriting in a scan, such as a signature, as [handwriting]: never guessed.

Across a benchmark corpus in five languages, no text went missing in any document (on 3 screenshots the OCR misread a few characters, 1–7%). Savings depend heavily on the document:

And it stays fast on an ordinary computer: on a 2020 laptop with 4 cores, 8 GB of RAM and no GPU, a dense phone screenshot becomes text in 1.5 s; even on a 2010 desktop with 2 cores, a 100-page PDF converts in 3.6 s (full numbers in TESTING).

Related MCP server: document-converter-mcp

How it compares

Measured against two well-known alternatives, on the same 31-document benchmark corpus (26 synthetic documents made by the Sugo project plus 5 real EU-regulation PDFs), with the same tokenizer and the same ground truth — full method, raw numbers and limits in docs/comparisons:

A tool that drops content also "saves" tokens on paper — that's data loss, not compression. Every number above is paired with what actually survived the conversion.

Fair caveats: the corpus is small and mostly synthetic, and it was built by the Sugo authors, so treat it as a sanity check, not a verdict. On the report PDFs Docling saves slightly more tokens than Sugo (about 38–48% vs 33–38%) without losing content; it is also several times slower on this corpus. Raw data and the full per-document table are in the linked comparison.

Status

See the roadmap for the full plan.

Quick start

Sugo needs Python 3.12, 3.13 or 3.14. The install is about 400 MB on disk, because the PDF library, the OCR engine and its models come with it. The easiest way to install it is with uv:

uv tool install sugo-cli

Or with pip:

pip install sugo-cli

If sugo is "not recognized" or "not found" after installing with pip, pip put it in a folder your system does not search. This happens on Windows when pip installs for your user only ("Defaulting to user installation"). Either install with uv tool install sugo-cli and run uv tool update-shell once, or add the folder pip names in its warning (on Windows, %APPDATA%\Python\Python3XX\Scripts) to your Path, then open a new terminal.

To run the latest development version from source instead:

uv tool install git+https://github.com/Muralnick/sugo

Convert a file and print its Markdown:

sugo report.pdf

Or type sugo alone to open the interactive shell: drag a file onto the window, press Enter, then use /stats, /save or /help.

More things you can do:

sugo convert *.pdf -o out/            # one NAME.md per file, in out/
sugo convert report.pdf --chunks      # chunks as JSON Lines, ready for RAG
sugo convert report.pdf --receipt     # also write report.receipt.json (see below)
sugo stats screenshot.png             # tokens saved, per LLM provider
sugo clip                             # convert the screenshot in your clipboard
sugo ui                               # open the local web page: drop a file, get Markdown
sugo doctor                           # check the installation

Add --json for output a script can read.

Check what was removed: the receipt

With --receipt (or the receipt setting on the web page), Sugo also writes NAME.receipt.json: the SHA-256 of the file, the Sugo version and settings used, the token counts, every block it removed or edited with the cleaner and the reason, and the blocks flagged as uncertain (such as low-confidence OCR). Later, anyone can check that the file still converts to the same result:

sugo verify report.pdf report.receipt.json

sugo verify converts the file again with the receipt's own settings and reports what differs, by block id only, never the text. The web page has the same check in its Verify tab:

The receipt shows that the conversion is faithful to the file: nothing dropped without a recorded reason, nothing invented. It says nothing about whether the document itself is genuine.

Use it from an AI agent (MCP)

Sugo can serve agents such as Claude Code or Codex over MCP. It reads only inside the folders you name:

claude mcp add sugo -- sugo mcp --root ~/Documents

The agent gets two tools: convert_document and estimate_savings. Sugo is also listed in the official MCP Registry as io.github.Muralnick/sugo, so clients that read the registry can install it from there.

Uninstall

Remove the program the same way you installed it:

uv tool uninstall sugo-cli

Or, if you used pip:

pip uninstall sugo-cli

If you added Sugo to an agent, remove it there too, for example claude mcp remove sugo.

Uninstalling the program does not delete the files Sugo created. They are only on your computer, and you can delete them by hand:

If you set SUGO_CACHE_DIR, the cache is in that folder instead. The cache holds text from the documents you converted, so delete it if those documents were private. Apart from these two folders and the files you asked it to write (such as -o output or receipts), Sugo keeps nothing else on disk.

On an old computer

Measured on 2026-11-03 on a 2010 desktop: Intel Core i5-650 (2 cores, 4 threads, no AVX), 8 GB RAM, SSD, no usable GPU. Weaker than the 8 GB, 4-core machine Sugo targets.

Native documents run well within the targets even on this machine. OCR is accurate but slow on a CPU without AVX; on the 4-core reference machine (Intel i5-10300H, 2020) the same screenshot takes 1.5 s, within the target. Details and scripts are in TESTING.

Supported files

Old .doc, .xls and .ppt files and password-protected files are not read: save a new copy first.

How it works

flowchart LR
    F[Your file] --> E[Reader<br/>PDF · Office · OCR · XML]
    E --> IR[Document → Page → Block]
    IR --> C[Cleaners<br/>propose removals]
    C --> K[Core<br/>applies and records them]
    K --> M[Markdown]
    K --> J[JSONL chunks]
    K --> S[Token metrics]

Each reader turns a file into the same structure of pages and blocks. Cleaners only propose changes; the core applies them and marks each removed block with who removed it and why, instead of deleting it. That is what makes the output checkable and reproducible. The full design is in ARCHITECTURE.

Promises

These are written down in PRINCIPLES and checked by tests:

• Local by principle. Conversion never needs the internet. No cloud API, no telemetry.

• No guessing. Unreadable text is marked as illegible, never filled in.

• Nothing silently lost. Every removal is recorded, with its reason.

• Honest metrics. Savings are measured, and Sugo also tells you when sending the original image would be cheaper.

• Safe with untrusted files. Size and time limits, XML parsed safely, models verified by checksum. See the threat model.

Documentation

Contributing and security

See CONTRIBUTING. Please report vulnerabilities privately, as described in SECURITY, not in public issues.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later (see ADR-010).