OCR and Supported Input Formats

Built-in OCR (Tesseract)

• Default: OCR enabled on parse.
• Engine: Tesseract bundled with the library (zero extra setup for typical English PDFs).
• Disable when PDFs have selectable text: --no-ocr or ocr_enabled=False.

lit parse document.pdf
lit parse document.pdf --ocr-language fra
lit parse document.pdf --no-ocr

parser = LiteParse(ocr_enabled=True, ocr_language="eng", num_workers=4)

Language codes

Use Tesseract codes (not ISO alone): eng, fra, deu, spa, chi_sim, etc. Map HTTP OCR language=en separately (see below).

Offline / air-gapped environments

Pre-download .traineddata files, then either:

export TESSDATA_PREFIX=/path/to/tessdata
lit parse document.pdf --ocr-language eng

or:

lit parse document.pdf --tessdata-path /path/to/tessdata

HTTP OCR servers (optional)

For higher accuracy or GPU-backed OCR, run a server implementing the LiteParse OCR API and point LiteParse at it:

lit parse document.pdf --ocr-server-url http://localhost:8080/ocr

parser = LiteParse(ocr_server_url="http://localhost:8080/ocr")

API contract (summary)

• POST {base_url}/ocr (typically http://host:8080/ocr)
• Content-Type: multipart/form-data
• Fields: file (image bytes, required), language (optional, ISO 639-1, default en)
• Response JSON:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "text": "recognized text",
      "bbox": [x1, y1, x2, y2],
      "confidence": 0.95
    }
  ]
}

• Origin top-left; bbox axis-aligned in pixels.
• Full spec: https://github.com/run-llama/liteparse/blob/main/OCR_API_SPEC.md

Reference server implementations (upstream repo)

• ocr/easyocr/ — EasyOCR wrapper
• ocr/paddleocr/ — PaddleOCR wrapper

You only need a server if you choose HTTP OCR; Tesseract is sufficient for many workflows.

Supported input formats

PDF (native)

.pdf — no conversion step.

Office documents (LibreOffice)

Requires LibreOffice installed and on PATH.

Install LibreOffice:

# macOS
brew install --cask libreoffice

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install libreoffice

# Windows (Chocolatey)
choco install libreoffice-fresh

On Windows, add LibreOffice program directory to PATH (often C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program).

Images (ImageMagick)

Requires ImageMagick.

Install ImageMagick:

# macOS
brew install imagemagick

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt-get install imagemagick

# Windows
choco install imagemagick.app

Conversion pipeline

Office / image → (LibreOffice or ImageMagick) → PDF → PDFium extract → optional OCR → grid projection → text + JSON

If conversion fails, install the missing tool and retry. Plain-text-only paths cannot be screenshot-rendered.