Best practices for parsing

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Handling handwriting or small text

• Use Agentic OCR.
• Best for: forms, signatures, handwritten notes.
• Tradeoff: slightly higher cost and latency in exchange for higher accuracy.

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Working with non-Germanic languages

• Use the Multilingual OCR system.
• Needed for: languages outside English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, French, or German.
• Also improves parsing of Unicode and special characters.

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Unexpected symbols in your output

• Cause: metadata embeddings in PDFs may contain corrupted or hidden text.
• Fix: switch to OCR extraction mode.
• Avoid: Hybrid or Metadata extraction modes unless you are sure the metadata is reliable.

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Missing checkboxes or images

• Enable experimental options in parse configs:
  • enable_checkboxes: Detects and returns checkboxes with True/False.
  • return_figure_images: Detects and returns figures in the document.
  • return_table_images: Detects and returns tables in the document.

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Complex tables causing problems?

• Option 1: Enrich with table mode
  • Enable enrich_mode with table.
  • Add prompts to guide how rows and columns should align.
• Option 2: AI JSON format
  • Use Table Output Format → ai_json.
  • Passes the table image to a model for structural analysis.
  • Tradeoff: higher latency, sometimes higher accuracy.

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Spreadsheet related configurations

• include_color_information: adds Excel cell color details with LaTeX to the parse output.
• spreadsheet_table_clustering: splits up individual tables inside of multi-table spreadsheets.
• large_table_chunking: splits very large tables into smaller, manageable chunks for downstream processing.