Parse Document

• Use ocr: "off" for native-text PDFs when OCR is unnecessary.
• Leave OCR on automatic behavior for scanned PDFs or image-heavy documents.
• Use ocrLanguage for a single OCR language.
• Use ocrLanguages only when you truly need multilingual OCR.
• Built-in Tesseract usually expects ISO 639-3 codes such as eng, deu, fra, or jpn.
• Many HTTP OCR servers instead expect ISO 639-1 codes such as en, de, fr, or ja.
• Increase dpi only when OCR quality or screenshot readability really needs it.
• Use ocrServerUrl only when the user already has or wants an external OCR server.

Note: on the first OCR run, LiteParse may download Tesseract language/model data.

Use screenshots only when text is not enough

Request screenshotPages when the task depends on visual layout, charts, handwriting, dense tables, or page appearance.

Do not request screenshots by default.

Important constraints:

• screenshots are currently generated only for PDF inputs
• screenshot output is PNG-based in this extension
• use screenshotPages: "all" to render all PDF pages when needed

Follow-up workflow

The tool writes parsed output to temporary files and returns their paths.

After calling it:

1. inspect the returned parsed output path with read
2. inspect screenshot paths with read when visual review is needed
3. only copy files into the project if the user actually wants persistent artifacts

Do not ask the tool to inline an entire large document into context. Let it save the full result, then inspect the returned files selectively.

Important constraints and expectations

• Office documents and spreadsheets may require LibreOffice on the host machine.
• Image inputs may require ImageMagick on the host machine.
• The tool surfaces those missing dependencies as friendly errors; do not misdiagnose them as generic parser failures.
• Parsed outputs are temporary by default. If the user wants durable files in the repo or a chosen folder, copy the returned temp files afterward.
• Screenshot output is PNG-based in this extension.
• The tool accepts PI-style paths such as @relative/file.pdf and ~/Documents/file.pdf.

Good default patterns

Summarize or review a document

Use:

• format: "text"
• targetPages if only part of the document matters
• ocr: "off" for clearly native-text PDFs

Then inspect the returned text file with read.

Extract positions or bounding boxes

Use:

• format: "json"
• targetPages when possible

Then inspect the JSON file with read.

Review a visually complex page

Use:

• text or JSON parsing as needed
• screenshotPages for the relevant PDF pages
• higher dpi only if readability is a problem

Then inspect the generated screenshots with read.

Parse a scanned or image-based document

Use:

• OCR enabled
• ocrLanguage or ocrLanguages when the document language is known
• optionally higher dpi
• JSON only if positional data matters

Parameter reminders

The tool supports these high-value parameters:

• path
• format
• targetPages
• screenshotPages
• ocr
• ocrLanguage
• ocrLanguages
• ocrServerUrl
• numWorkers
• maxPages
• dpi
• preciseBoundingBox
• preserveSmallText
• preserveLayoutAlignmentAcrossPages

Prefer a minimal parameter set. Only add advanced options when the task clearly benefits from them.