LiteParse

Rust library and CLI for fast, lightweight PDF and document parsing with spatial text extraction. Runs entirely locally with zero cloud dependencies.

LiteParse is also available for Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and the browser (WASM). See the project README for all options.

Installation

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
liteparse = "2"

Or install the CLI:

cargo install liteparse

Quick Start

use liteparse::{LiteParse, LiteParseConfig};

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let parser = LiteParse::new(LiteParseConfig::default());
    let result = parser.parse("document.pdf").await?;

    println!("{}", result.text);

    for page in &result.pages {
        println!("Page {}: {} text items", page.page_num, page.text_items.len());
    }

    Ok(())
}

Configuration

use liteparse::{LiteParse, LiteParseConfig, OutputFormat};

let config = LiteParseConfig {
    ocr_enabled: true,                    // Enable OCR (default: true)
    ocr_language: "eng".to_string(),      // Tesseract language code
    ocr_server_url: None,                 // HTTP OCR server URL (optional)
    tessdata_path: None,                  // Path to tessdata directory (optional)
    max_pages: 1000,                      // Max pages to parse
    target_pages: Some("1-5,10".into()),  // Specific pages (optional)
    dpi: 150.0,                           // Rendering DPI
    output_format: OutputFormat::Json,    // Json | Text | Markdown
    preserve_very_small_text: false,      // Keep tiny text
    password: None,                       // Password for protected documents
    quiet: false,                         // Suppress progress output
    ..Default::default()
};

let parser = LiteParse::new(config);

Markdown Output

LiteParse can render documents directly to Markdown, including headings, tables, lists, images, and links reconstructed from the spatial layout. Set output_format: OutputFormat::Markdown; the rendered Markdown is returned on result.text. Two related knobs control Markdown rendering:

• image_mode (ImageMode::Placeholder default | Off | Embed) — how raster images are surfaced in the output.
• extract_links (default true) — render hyperlink annotations as [text](url); set false for plain anchor text.

use liteparse::config::{ImageMode, LiteParseConfig, OutputFormat};

let config = LiteParseConfig {
    output_format: OutputFormat::Markdown,
    image_mode: ImageMode::Placeholder,
    extract_links: true,
    ..Default::default()
};
let result = LiteParse::new(config).parse("document.pdf").await?;
println!("{}", result.text); // rendered Markdown

Reconstruction quality varies with document complexity.

Parsing from Bytes

use liteparse::types::PdfInput;

let pdf_bytes: Vec<u8> = std::fs::read("document.pdf")?;
let result = parser.parse_input(PdfInput::Bytes(pdf_bytes)).await?;
println!("{}", result.text);

Document Complexity

Before committing to a full parse, check whether a document needs OCR or heavier processing. is_complex is a cheap, text-layer-only pass that returns a PageComplexityStats per page with a needs_ocr verdict and the signals behind it — useful for routing documents to different pipelines, rejecting ones you can't handle, or estimating cost.

use liteparse::types::PdfInput;

let parser = LiteParse::new(LiteParseConfig::default());
let pages = parser.is_complex(PdfInput::Path("document.pdf".into())).await?;

if pages.iter().any(|p| p.needs_ocr) {
    // Route to the OCR-enabled pipeline, inspect `p.reasons`, etc.
    for page in pages.iter().filter(|p| p.needs_ocr) {
        println!("Page {} needs OCR: {:?}", page.page_number, page.reasons);
    }
}

reasons is a Vec<ComplexityReason> (Scanned, NoText, SparseText, EmbeddedImages, Garbled, VectorText); new variants may be added over time, so match leniently.

Custom OCR Engine

Implement the OcrEngine trait to plug in your own OCR backend:

use liteparse::ocr::OcrEngine;
use std::sync::Arc;

let parser = LiteParse::new(LiteParseConfig::default())
    .with_ocr_engine(Arc::new(my_engine));

Features

• tesseract (default) — Built-in Tesseract OCR via tesseract-rs. Disable with default-features = false if you don't need OCR or want to use an HTTP OCR server instead.

Supported Formats

• PDF (.pdf)
• Microsoft Office (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.) — requires LibreOffice
• OpenDocument (.odt, .ods, .odp) — requires LibreOffice
• Images (.png, .jpg, .tiff, etc.) — requires ImageMagick

CLI

The crate also builds the lit CLI binary:

lit parse document.pdf
lit parse document.pdf --format json -o output.json
lit parse document.pdf --format markdown -o output.md
lit screenshot document.pdf -o ./screenshots
lit batch-parse ./input ./output
lit is-complex document.pdf

See lit --help for all options.

License

Apache-2.0