LiteParse

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Looking for LiteParse V1? Follow this link to the old code

LiteParse is a standalone OSS PDF parsing tool focused exclusively on fast and light parsing. It provides high-quality spatial text parsing with bounding boxes, without proprietary LLM features or cloud dependencies. Everything runs locally on your machine.

Hitting the limits of local parsing? For complex documents (dense tables, multi-column layouts, charts, handwritten text, or scanned PDFs), you'll get significantly better results with LlamaParse, our cloud-based document parser built for production document pipelines. LlamaParse handles the hard stuff so your models see clean, structured data and markdown.

Sign up for LlamaParse free

Overview

• Fast Text Parsing: Spatial text parsing using PDFium, ~2-5ms per page
• Flexible OCR System:
  • Built-in: Tesseract (zero setup, bundled with the library)
  • HTTP Servers: Plug in any OCR server (EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, custom)
  • Standard API: Simple, well-defined OCR API specification
• Complexity Detection: Cheaply check whether a document needs OCR or heavier parsing — route, reject, or estimate cost before a full parse
• Screenshot Generation: Generate high-quality page screenshots for LLM agents
• Multiple Output Formats: Markdown, JSON, and Text
• Markdown Output: Structured Markdown with headings, tables, lists, images, and links — great for feeding LLMs and RAG pipelines
• Bounding Boxes: Precise text positioning information
• Multi-language: Use from Rust, Node.js/TypeScript, Python, or the browser (WASM)
• Worker Pool Mode (Python & Node.js): Parse in persistent worker processes for true parallelism (PDFium otherwise serializes concurrent parses) and hard per-parse timeouts — rogue documents are killed, identified by name, and never stall the pipeline
• Multi-platform: Linux, macOS (Intel/ARM), Windows

flowchart LR
      subgraph Input["Input Formats"]
          direction TB
          PDF["PDF"]
          DOCX["DOCX"]
          XLSX["XLSX"]
          PPTX["PPTX"]
          IMG["Images"]
      end

      subgraph Core["Rust Core"]
          direction TB
          CONV["Format Conversion\nLibreOffice / Rust image + resvg + usvg crates"]
          EXTRACT["Text Extraction\nPDFium C library"]
          OCR["Selective OCR\nTesseract / HTTP / Custom"]
          MERGE["OCR Merge\nNative text + OCR results"]
          PROJ["Grid Projection\nSpatial layout reconstruction"]
          CONV --> EXTRACT
          EXTRACT --> OCR --> MERGE --> PROJ
          EXTRACT --> MERGE
      end

      subgraph Output[" Output "]
          direction TB
          JSON["Structured JSON\ntext + bounding boxes"]
          TEXT["Plain Text\nlayout-preserved"]
          SCREEN["Screenshots\nPNG rendering"]
      end

      subgraph Bindings["Language Bindings"]
          direction TB
          NAPI["Node.js / TypeScript\nnapi-rs"]
          PYO3["Python\nPyO3"]
          WASM["Browser / WASM\nwasm-bindgen"]
          CLI["CLI\ncargo / npm / pip"]
          NAPI ~~~ PYO3 ~~~ WASM ~~~ CLI
      end

      PDF --> EXTRACT
      DOCX & XLSX & PPTX & IMG --> CONV
      PROJ --> JSON & TEXT & SCREEN
      JSON & TEXT & SCREEN --> Bindings

      style Input fill:#F5F5F5,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:2px
      style Core fill:#F5F5F5,color:#000000,stroke:#3E18F9,stroke-width:2px
      style Output fill:#F5F5F5,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8705,stroke-width:2px
      style Bindings fill:#F5F5F5,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8DF2,stroke-width:2px

      style PDF fill:#96E7F9,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:1px
      style DOCX fill:#96E7F9,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:1px
      style XLSX fill:#96E7F9,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:1px
      style PPTX fill:#96E7F9,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:1px
      style IMG fill:#96E7F9,color:#000000,stroke:#37D7FA,stroke-width:1px

      style CONV fill:#92AEFF,color:#000000,stroke:#4B72FE,stroke-width:1px
      style EXTRACT fill:#92AEFF,color:#000000,stroke:#4B72FE,stroke-width:1px
      style OCR fill:#92AEFF,color:#000000,stroke:#4B72FE,stroke-width:1px
      style MERGE fill:#92AEFF,color:#000000,stroke:#4B72FE,stroke-width:1px
      style PROJ fill:#4B72FE,color:#FFFFFF,stroke:#3E18F9,stroke-width:2px

      style JSON fill:#FFBD74,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8705,stroke-width:1px
      style TEXT fill:#FFBD74,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8705,stroke-width:1px
      style SCREEN fill:#FFBD74,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8705,stroke-width:1px

      style NAPI fill:#FFBFF8,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8DF2,stroke-width:1px
      style PYO3 fill:#FFBFF8,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8DF2,stroke-width:1px
      style WASM fill:#FFBFF8,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8DF2,stroke-width:1px
      style CLI fill:#FFBFF8,color:#000000,stroke:#FF8DF2,stroke-width:1px

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