The award-winning AI-powered Publications Importer helps councils convert PDF documents (and other types) into structured HTML publications within LocalGov Drupal.
The Publications Importer was developed by Southwark Council, Chicken and the LocalGov Drupal community.
Award-winning work
Southwark Council and The Publications Importer won the Digital Leaders AI Impact Award for Local Government and Community Services 2026.
The award recognised a practical use of AI in public services: reducing manual publishing work, improving accessibility and helping council teams get better content online faster.
Solving the pdf problem
Councils are trying to reduce the number of PDFs they publish.
HTML content is easier to read, search, update and maintain. It works better on mobile devices and gives users a clearer route through longer documents.
The repetitive work of copying and pasting content from PDFs into HTML is slow, frustrating and demoralising. The Publications Importer helps remove some of that grind, so editors can focus on accuracy, accessibility, plain English and user needs.
What the Publications Importer does
The Publications Importer allows editors to:
- Upload a PDF directly into LocalGov Drupal
- Convert the document into a structured HTML publication
- Review and edit content before publishing
- Use optional AI-assisted tools to improve structure and formatting
- Keep a log of imports, so errors can be reviewed and fixed
Once imported, the content can be managed like other LocalGov Drupal content.
This makes it easier to:
- Improve accessibility
- Keep information up to date
- Add working links and navigation
- Assign content ownership
- Search and reuse content across the website
- Reduce reliance on PDFs
Built for LocalGov Drupal Publications
The PDF Importer works with the LocalGov Drupal Publications feature.
Publications give councils a structured, accessible way to publish longer content such as annual reports, council plans, strategies, policy documents and guidance.
They include navigation for longer documents and allow editors to manage content in smaller, more maintainable sections.
Together, Publications and the PDF Importer provide a practical route away from PDF-first publishing.
Preserves more than just text
PDFs often flatten content. Links become plain text. Images lose their context. Headings, lists and tables may look structured to a person, but they are not always structured in a way a website can use.
The PDF Importer can:
- Extract text from PDF documents.
- Restore URLs as clickable links.
- Pull many images into the Drupal media library.
- Support headings, lists and tables.
- Create publication sections that editors can review and refine.
This reduces the amount of manual editing required after import and helps teams produce usable content more quickly.
AI is optional
Some PDFs convert cleanly. Others are more complicated.
A PDF might include inconsistent headings, awkward page breaks, tables, images, footnotes or layout choices that made sense in print but do not work well online.
The PDF Importer includes optional AI-assisted formatting.
AI can help:
- Rebuild heading structures.
- Recreate lists.
- Improve table formatting.
- Suggest logical page breaks.
- Create sensible section titles.
- Turn a rough import into a more usable draft.
- The aim is not to replace editors.
The aim is to remove repetitive formatting work, so editors can focus on checking accuracy, improving accessibility and meeting user needs.
Councils that do not want to use AI do not have to. The AI step is optional and configurable.
Developed by councils, for councils
The PDF Importer started with a common LocalGov Drupal problem.
The Publications feature already gave councils a way to create structured, accessible HTML publications. But councils also had large backlogs of existing PDFs. They needed a way to bring that content into the same publishing workflow.
Southwark Council funded the first production version, working with Chicken and the LocalGov Drupal community.
West Lindsey District Council has since funded further development, including work on cover pages, paragraph improvements and importing from Word documents.
The module is open source and available on Drupal.org.
Any council can use it, test it, improve it and help shape what comes next.
Proven with real council content - Southwark Council's experience
Southwark Council had more than 2,000 PDFs across its digital estate. Many were designed for print and contained important information. Converting that kind of backlog manually would take a significant amount of staff time. Manual PDF conversion is also not the best use of a content designer’s skills.
PDF-to-HTML conversion time has been reduced from hours, sometimes days, to under one minute in the Southwark case study.
Chicken’s own benchmark gives another useful example. A typical 50-page document can take around 250 minutes to copy and paste manually. The importer can process that kind of document in under 10 minutes.
In practice, timings vary depending on the size and complexity of the PDF. Southwark’s content team reported imports taking a few minutes for some documents.
The important point is not that every document imports instantly. It is that editors can start with structured web content instead of rebuilding long documents page by page.
Find out more
The Publications Importer is available as an open source module for LocalGov Drupal and continues to evolve through community collaboration.
You can try the module, join the discussion in the LocalGov Drupal Slack channel or contribute to future development through the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund.