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

# Introduction

> One API for every visual model

The VLM Run Gateway is a **fully OpenAI chat completions-compatible** API for visual intelligence.
If you're building document extraction or visual understanding, Gateway exposes OCR,
VQA, and detection behind a single interface you already know: OpenAI's `chat.completions`.
Point `base_url` at `https://gateway.vlm.run/v1/openai`, and every model on the catalog speaks
the same request shape your existing SDK calls already use.

## Why the Gateway

General-purpose model routers are built for text LLMs, so they usually cover only a small slice
of visual workloads. The VLM Run Gateway is built around OCR and VQA instead:

* **One API, multiple supported models.** Use `qwen/qwen3.5-0.8b` for visual question answering,
  `paddleocr/pp-ocrv6` for OCR and text detection, and `zai-org/glm-ocr` / `rednote-hilab/dots.mocr`
  for reading-order markdown OCR, all through the same `chat.completions` shape.
* **Embeddings and transcription too.** `qwen/qwen3-vl-embedding-2b` (embeddings) and
  `nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3` (audio transcription) are available through their own
  OpenAI-compatible endpoints under the same `base_url` and API key.
* **Document routing built in.** Multi-page PDFs are decoded, rasterized, and fanned out per page
  automatically at the ingress layer, so you do not have to split or stitch documents yourself.
* **Method and DPI routing.** `method` selects the operation a model runs (`ocr`, `detect`,
  `markdown`, …); `document_dpi` tunes how much detail reaches the OCR model per page.
* **Operational signals included.** Use the live catalog at
  [`GET /v1/openai/models`](/gateway/api-reference/get-models), per-request `usage.cost` for
  metering, and `x-request-id` for tracing on every response.

Treat model, method, and DPI as one tunable unit: start with the cheapest combination that clears
your accuracy bar, and only pay for more where it moves the numbers.

## Next steps

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="rocket" href="/gateway/quickstart">
    Prerequisites, plus first VQA and document OCR requests.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Flexible Document OCR" icon="file-lines" href="/gateway/guides/document-ocr">
    Request knobs, page blocks, and streaming for PDFs.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Models" icon="table-list" href="/gateway/models">
    Catalog, capabilities, and model selection.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Methods" icon="list-check" href="/gateway/methods">
    Method and `method_params` reference.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>