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OCR and documents

Convert Office files, ebooks and PDFs to Markdown, and read text out of scanned pages.

Webfold converts documents through the Superdocuments library. Plain formats convert directly. A PDF page with no text layer falls back to optical character recognition.

Formats

Format Route
DOCX, DOCM Markdown through convert
PPTX Text per slide
XLSX, XLSM, XLSB One section per sheet; structured sheet reads are available in the library
ODT, ODP, ODS Markdown through convert
EPUB Markdown, or spine-ordered text and a book structure in the library
RTF, CSV, HTML, text Markdown
Legacy XLS Through Webfold’s own adapter (webfold convert), not the library alone
PDF Text extraction to Markdown, with an optional OCR fallback 
webfold convert report.docx
webfold pdf report.pdf
webfold pdf scan.pdf --chunk 4000
webfold chunk notes.docx --size 3000 --jsonl

How OCR works

  1. The PDF parser reads each page’s own text layer.
  2. A page with no text, or a scan whose only text is a stamp, is rendered to an image with Poppler’s pdftoppm. Other pages keep their own text.
  3. Tesseract recognises the text and it is returned as Markdown with the rest of the document.

In library code:

let markdown = superdocuments::pdf::extract_file("scan.pdf")?;

Structure, not just text

The library also exposes structured output: xlsx::read_workbook and read_sheet, epub::read, pdf::outline, JSON page output and a DocumentGraph of regions with provenance.

What to expect

See the document benchmark for speed figures and their limits.

Hosted API

curl -s https://api.webfold.ai/v1/ocr \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBFOLD_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"content_base64":"<base64 of scan.pdf>","languages":"eng","max_pages":20}'

POST /v1/ocr reads the PDF’s own text first ("method": "text") and falls back to Tesseract for pages without one ("method": "ocr"). The file is sent in the request, up to 25 MiB. languages takes Tesseract codes such as eng+deu, max_pages is 1 to 200, and timeout_secs is 1 to 300. A server runs a few OCR jobs at once, so a busy one answers 503; retry shortly. POST /v1/documents/convert does the same for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, EPUB, RTF, CSV and HTML. See the API reference.