PaddleOCR

Kotaemon provides two PaddleOCR readers to enable document ingestion with full layout understanding, including multilingual text, tables, figures, formulas, and seals.

• PaddleOCRVLReader: Wraps the PaddleOCR-VL 1.5 visual-language model for robust layout and VQA-based parsing.
• PPStructureV3Reader: Uses the PPStructureV3 pipeline for structured layout analysis, including table and chart detection.

Both readers are located under kotaemon/loaders/paddleocr_loader.

Prerequisites

• Install PaddlePaddle:
  • Ensure that the installed PaddlePaddle version matches your system configuration and hardware (CPU/GPU). For additional wheel options, refer to the PaddlePaddle official website.
  • Check device support for PaddleOCR-VL.

# CPU
uv pip install paddlepaddle==3.3.0 -i https://www.paddlepaddle.org.cn/packages/stable/cpu/

# gpu，requires GPU driver version ≥550.54.14 (Linux) or ≥550.54.14 (Windows)
uv pip install paddlepaddle-gpu==3.3.0 -i https://www.paddlepaddle.org.cn/packages/stable/cu130/

• Install the PaddleOCR doc parser extras:

uv pip install -e "libs/kotaemon[paddleocr]"

• Configure the device: You can set the PADDLE_DEVICE environment variable in your .env file to control the execution device.

PADDLE_DEVICE=gpu # cpu, gpu:0

Configure the loader

1. Run Kotaemon and open the app UI.
2. Navigate to Settings → File Loader (under indexing or ingestion settings).
3. Select one of the PaddleOCR loaders:
   • PaddleOCR PPStructureV3 (table+figure extraction)
   • PaddleOCR-VL (VLM document parsing)
4. Save the settings, then upload or ingest a document. Kotaemon will automatically use the selected PaddleOCR loader during indexing and convert extracted content into Document objects.