beta

Extract text and images from documents

🤖/document/extract extracts native text and embedded raster images from PDF documents.

Usage example

{
  "steps": {
    "extracted": {
      "robot": "/document/extract",
      "use": ":original",
      "extract": [
        "text",
        "images"
      ],
      "text_method": "native"
    }
  }
}

Parameters

• interpolate

  boolean | Record<string, boolean>

  Controls whether Assembly Variables are interpolated for individual instruction fields.

  By default, most Robot instruction fields interpolate Assembly Variables. Set this to false to treat every instruction field as literal text, or set an individual field path to false to treat only that field as literal text. For Robot-specific fields that are literal by default, set this to true or set that field path to true to opt back into interpolation.

  Use field names such as path, or dotted paths such as ffmpeg.vf for nested objects.

• output_meta

  Record<string, boolean> | boolean | Array<string>

  Allows you to specify a set of metadata that is more expensive on CPU power to calculate, and thus is disabled by default to keep your Assemblies processing fast.

  For images, you can add "has_transparency": true in this object to extract if the image contains transparent parts and "dominant_colors": true to extract an array of hexadecimal color codes from the image.

  For images, you can also add "blurhash": true to extract a BlurHash⁠ string — a compact representation of a placeholder for the image, useful for showing a blurred preview while the full image loads.

  For videos, you can add the "colorspace": true parameter to extract the colorspace of the output video.

  For videos, you can also add "interlaced": true to detect whether the video is interlaced. This combines the cheap ffprobe field_order flag with a bounded idet sampling pass over the first frames of the source, exposing interlaced, field_order, and a diagnostic interlace_detection object under file.meta. This is computationally expensive and billed accordingly.

  For audio, you can add "mean_volume": true to get a single value representing the mean average volume of the audio file.

  You can also set this to false to skip metadata extraction and speed up transcoding.

• result

  boolean(default: false)

  Whether the results of this Step should be present in the Assembly Status JSON

• queue

  batch

  Setting the queue to 'batch', manually downgrades the priority of jobs for this step to avoid consuming Priority job slots for jobs that don't need zero queue waiting times

• force_accept

  boolean(default: false)

  Force a Robot to accept a file type it would have ignored.

  By default, Robots ignore files they are not familiar with. 🤖/video/encode, for example, will happily ignore input images.

  With the force_accept parameter set to true, you can force Robots to accept all files thrown at them. This will typically lead to errors and should only be used for debugging or combatting edge cases.

• ignore_errors

  boolean | Array<meta | execute>(default: [])

  Ignore errors during specific phases of processing.

  Setting this to ["meta"] will cause the Robot to ignore errors during metadata extraction.

  Setting this to ["execute"] will cause the Robot to ignore errors during the main execution phase.

  Setting this to true is equivalent to ["meta", "execute"] and will ignore errors in both phases.

• use

  string | Array<string> | Array<object> | object

  Specifies which Step(s) to use as input.

  • You can pick any names for Steps except ":original" (reserved for user uploads handled by Transloadit)
  • You can provide several Steps as input with arrays:

    {
      "use": [
        ":original",
        "encoded",
        "resized"
      ]
    }
    

  • You can also tag input Steps with as to pass semantic intent to robots:

    {
      "use": [
        {
          "name": ":original",
          "as": "image"
        },
        {
          "name": ":original",
          "as": "mask"
        }
      ]
    }
    

  Tip

  That's likely all you need to know about use, but you can view Advanced use cases.

• extract

  text | images | Array<text | images>(default: ["text","images"])

  Selects which assets to extract. Use ["text"], ["images"], or ["text", "images"].

• page_range

  string

  Optional comma-separated page selection, such as "1", "1-3", or "1,3-5". Page numbers start at 1. Ranges are clamped to the detected page count.

  At most 1,000 selected pages are allowed per job.

  This is supported for native text extraction and embedded image extraction. OCR extraction currently works on the full document.

• password

  string

  Password used to unlock encrypted PDFs for native text extraction and embedded image extraction. OCR extraction currently does not support encrypted PDFs, so do not combine this with text_method: "ocr" or text_method: "auto".

• text_method

  native | ocr | auto(default: "native")

  Controls how text is extracted.

  • "native" extracts selectable PDF text locally with Poppler. This is fast, but returns little or no text for scanned PDFs.
  • "ocr" delegates to /document/ocr and requires ocr_provider.
  • "auto" tries native extraction first, then falls back to OCR when no native text is found. This also requires ocr_provider.

  OCR modes currently cannot be combined with password.

• ocr_provider

  aws | gcp

  OCR provider to use when text_method is "ocr" or "auto". Valid values are "aws" and "gcp".

• text_format

  txt | json(default: "txt")

  Output format for extracted text. Use "txt" for plain text or "json" for structured output.

• text_granularity

  document | page(default: "document")

  Controls text output grouping for native extraction.

  • "document" creates one text result for the selected pages.
  • "page" creates one text result per selected page.

  Page granularity is currently only supported with text_method: "native".

• image_format

  auto | original | png | jpg(default: "auto")

  Output format for extracted embedded raster images.

  • "auto" and "original" preserve the embedded image format where possible.
  • "png" asks Poppler to decode images as PNG.
  • "jpg" converts non-JPEG extracted images through /image/resize.

• min_image_width

  string | number(default: 0)

  Minimum width in pixels for extracted images. Smaller images are ignored. Set to 0 to disable this filter.

• min_image_height

  string | number(default: 0)

  Minimum height in pixels for extracted images. Smaller images are ignored. Set to 0 to disable this filter.

• min_image_bytes

  string | number(default: 0)

  Minimum file size in bytes for extracted images. Smaller images are ignored.

• dedupe_images

  boolean(default: true)

  When enabled, identical extracted image files are emitted only once.

• include_image_masks

  boolean(default: false)

  When enabled, the robot also keeps image mask files when Poppler exposes them as separate files.