LiteParse Skill

Parse unstructured documents (PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, images, and more) locally with LiteParse: fast, lightweight, no cloud dependencies or LLM required.

Step 0 - Use via npx, or install LiteParse

NOTE: Rather than installing liteparse globally, you can instead run it directly with npx, substituting lit <args> with npx -y @llamaindex/liteparse <args> in the commands below.

npx -y @llamaindex/liteparse

Otherwise if installing globally, use pnpm install -g @llamaindex/liteparse and then run lit <args>.

Step 1 - Produce the CLI Command or Script

Parse a Single File

# Basic text extraction
lit parse document.pdf

# JSON output saved to a file
lit parse document.pdf --format json -o output.json

# Specific page range
lit parse document.pdf --target-pages "1-5,10,15-20"

# Disable OCR (faster, text-only PDFs)
lit parse document.pdf --no-ocr

# Use an external HTTP OCR server for higher accuracy
lit parse document.pdf --ocr-server-url http://localhost:8828/ocr

# Higher DPI for better quality
lit parse document.pdf --dpi 300

Batch Parse a Directory

lit batch-parse ./input-directory ./output-directory

# Only process PDFs, recursively
lit batch-parse ./input ./output --extension .pdf --recursive

Generate Page Screenshots

Screenshots are useful for LLM agents that need to see visual layout.

# All pages
lit screenshot document.pdf -o ./screenshots

# Specific pages
lit screenshot document.pdf --pages "1,3,5" -o ./screenshots

# High-DPI PNG
lit screenshot document.pdf --dpi 300 --format png -o ./screenshots

# Page range
lit screenshot document.pdf --pages "1-10" -o ./screenshots

Step 3 - Key Options Reference

OCR Options

Output Options

Performance / Quality Options

Step 4 - Using a Config File

For repeated use with consistent options, generate a liteparse.config.json:

{
  "ocrLanguage": "en",
  "ocrEnabled": true,
  "maxPages": 1000,
  "dpi": 150,
  "outputFormat": "json",
  "preciseBoundingBox": true,
  "skipDiagonalText": false,
  "preserveVerySmallText": false
}

For an HTTP OCR server:

{
  "ocrServerUrl": "http://localhost:8828/ocr",
  "ocrLanguage": "en",
  "outputFormat": "json"
}

Use with:

lit parse document.pdf --config liteparse.config.json

Step 5 - HTTP OCR Server API (Advanced)

If the user wants to plug in a custom OCR backend, the server must implement:

• Endpoint: POST /ocr
• Accepts: file (multipart) and language (string) parameters
• Returns:

{
  "results": [
    { "text": "Hello", "bbox": [x1, y1, x2, y2], "confidence": 0.98 }
  ]
}

Ready-to-use wrappers exist for EasyOCR and PaddleOCR in the LiteParse repo.

Supported Input Formats

Office documents require LibreOffice; images require ImageMagick. LiteParse auto-converts these formats to PDF before parsing.