feat: add basic README

README.md

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+# PDF to Markdown
+
+There are numerous instances where we need to process PDFs into Markdown to enable programmatic extraction and modern pipelines.
+This repository is a minimal environment to perform these computations locally (requires access to enterprise GPUs) or with [datalab](https://datalab.to) API calls.
+
+The `scratch/` directory can be used to run jobs as it is ignored by git.
+
+## Datalab
+
+[Datalab](https://datalab.to) offers a pay-as-you-go service with $10 of free credits per month.
+It is $0.01 per page when converting to Markdown with their "Accurate" quality.
+
+Set your API key as an environment variable.
+
+```sh
+export DATALAB_API_KEY=your_api_key_here
+```
+
+We also prefer setting a consistent Datalab pipeline ID as an environment variable.
+
+```sh
+export DATALAB_PIPELINE_ID=your_pipeline_id_here
+```
+
+You can then run your API call with:
+
+```sh
+pixi run -e datalab datalab custom-pipeline --pipeline_id "${DATALAB_PIPELINE_ID}" --format markdown PATH
+```