AILANG Parse
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Universal document parsing and generation in AILANG. Extracts structured content from DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, PDF, and image files into JSON and markdown — and writes documents back out in 9 formats. To author a document, write Markdown and convert it; see Writing documents in Markdown.
Office formats (DOCX, PPTX, XLSX) use deterministic XML parsing — no AI, no cloud, instant results. PDFs default to the deterministic pdftotext backend (poppler) — also no AI, no cloud — with poppler (headings, lists, tables and header/footer from the same tools, no installs), docling and liteparse as local alternatives escalating automatically to local docling OCR for scanned/image-only PDFs. Pluggable AI (Gemini, Claude, local Ollama) is available via --pdf-backend ai but is never chosen automatically. Images delegate to whatever AI model you plug in. AILANG Parse is AI-agnostic: swap --pdf-backend/--ai to change the backend, zero code changes.
Install
Two routes; both put a docparse command on your PATH, and both write output
next to the file you parse (--output-dir DIR or DOCPARSE_OUTPUT_DIR to
change that).
Already have AILANG? (0.42.0+ of
this package, AILANG v0.40.0 dev or later)
The package's [bin] table gives you a shim in ~/.ailang/bin that runs
straight out of the registry cache: parse one file, or --convert it. It is
deliberately the thin path — describe/summarize, batch mode, PDF backends
and --install-backends are not on it (see below). ailang bin list /
ailang bin uninstall docparse manage it.
Otherwise, or for the full CLI:
Fetches the published package (~400 KB), installs the AILANG runtime if you do
not have it, and links the full docparse wrapper (plus docparse-audit and
docparse-render) into ~/.local/bin. --version, --prefix and
--uninstall are supported; re-running is a no-op. If you install both,
ailang install tells you which one docparse resolves to.
That covers every deterministic format. PDF needs two more things, and they are
easy to miss:
--install-backends matters even if you never pass --pdf-backend: when
pdftotext finds no text layer the parser escalates to docling on its own, so
without it a scanned PDF fails on the default backend. AI backends
authenticate with Google ADC (gcloud auth application-default login), not an
API key.
Contributors: install from a clone instead
The wrapper finds the project root by walking up for docparse/main.ail, so it
works from a clone, an installed prefix, or a symlink chain. Note that the CLI
wrapper and the PDF adapter live under assets/ — the only path the AILANG
publisher bundles verbatim — with symlinks at their historical locations.
SDKs
Use AILANG Parse from your language of choice:
Quick Start
Output
Every run produces, in the directory you ran from (--output-dir DIR or
DOCPARSE_OUTPUT_DIR to change it):
<filename>.json — Structured JSON with typed blocks
<filename>.md — LLM-ready markdown
What AILANG Parse Extracts
OfficeDocBench v2 (87 files, 11 formats, 8 metrics): AILANG Parse PR #116 candidate 98.1% composite with 100.0% coverage. Ten adapters compared, including the hosted Extend (Parse 2.0, 53.3% coverage-adjusted) and LlamaParse (standard mode) APIs. Source-verified structural assertions now measure cell positions, comment targets, list depth, formatting, formulas, colours, and slide/notes relationships. Methodology and results.
Supported Formats
Parsing (16 formats): DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, ODT, ODP, ODS, HTML, Markdown, CSV, EPUB, EML, MBOX, TEX, RTF, PDF, images (JPG/PNG)
Generation (9 formats): DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, ODT, ODP, ODS, HTML, Markdown, QMD (Quarto)
Writing documents in Markdown
Markdown is the input an LLM can write, so it is the practical way to generate a
document: write markdown, convert to any of the nine output formats.
What survives the trip: YAML front matter (title/author/date → document
properties), bold/italic/code/strike as real character formatting,
links as real hyperlinks, images (local paths are read and embedded), fenced
code blocks, blockquotes, nested lists, thematic breaks, and tables with
alignment and column spans.
Headers, footers, comments and tracked changes have no Markdown syntax; those
are preserved when converting from a document that already contains them.
Local document verification (v0.41.2+)
docparse-audit and docparse-render are AILANG companions to the CLI.
AILANG Parse v0.41.2 requires AILANG 0.35.0 or newer. They run
locally and require no hosted account. The installer links them when present in
the installed release; in a checkout use ./bin/docparse-audit and
./bin/docparse-render.
The read-only DOCX audit emits JSON inventories and findings for table grids and
headers, heading gaps, image descriptions, links, comments and fields. Exit codes
are 0 for a completed audit, 1 for findings with --strict, and 2 for unreadable
input. It is a bounded structural check; it does not certify accessibility or
resolve arbitrary style inheritance.
Rendering supports .docx, .odt, .pptx, .xlsx and .pdf. Install LibreOffice
and Poppler for Office input; PDF needs only Poppler. No new Python dependency is
needed. Select tools with --soffice / --pdftoppm (or DOCPARSE_SOFFICE /
DOCPARSE_PDFTOPPM). --dpi defaults to 144 and --timeout to 120 seconds per
process. The output directory must be new. Each document gets a PDF and numbered
PNG pages; the manifest records source hashes, tool paths and page directories.
Comparison identifies changed/added/removed pages using uncompressed raster
hashes. Inspect the two PNG sets side by side; no diff overlays are generated.
visual_review: pending means page images still need inspection.
The implementation is in docparse/services/document_render.ail and
docparse/services/docx_audit.ail; regression verification is AILANG too:
Styling a generated DOCX from a template
--reference-doc is the Quarto/Pandoc reference-doc feature: an existing
.docx supplies the look, the Markdown supplies the content.
Generated tables use the selected section's usable width, with bounded content
weights for columns and repeating semantic headers. Merged-cell widths sum the
columns they cover.
The template's styles.xml, numbering.xml, theme, embedded fonts, headers,
footers and page setup are applied to the new content. Everything the merge does
not regenerate is carried through byte-for-byte, so the letterhead, logo and
licensed fonts come out exactly as they went in.
What comes from where:
Two consequences worth knowing:
- The template's headers and footers win. A source document's own headers are
dropped rather than mixed with the letterhead. The page furniture all lives in
the template's body
<w:sectPr>, which is lifted whole.
- The template's comments are dropped along with its body, and so are
commentsExtended.xml and people.xml. Comments in the source document
still come through.
Two flags refine a multi-section template:
--reference-section N picks which of the template's sections supplies the
page setup, headers and footers — 1 is the first section, Word's numbering.
The default is the last section (the body-level one, what the flag-less
behaviour has always lifted). A multi-section template's wanted furniture is
often an earlier section's — the master agreement's CONFIDENTIAL footer, not
the Annex's missing one.
--table-style NAME binds generated tables to a table style the template
defines (matched on styleId, then style name). Without it, the style named
Table is used if the template has one, else the first table style that is
not the implicit Normal Table. Under a bound style the generator stops
emitting its own hardcoded borders — the style carries them.
An unreadable or non-DOCX reference is an error and writes nothing — a silent
fallback to the built-in styling would produce a plausible file missing exactly
the letterhead it was asked for. DOCX output only.
Architecture
91 contracts, 50+ inline tests. Of the 91, Z3 proves 14 outright; the rest are
checked at runtime under --prove/--verify-contracts in CI, and skip statically
because parser code is recursive and higher-order, which is outside Z3's
decidable fragment.
AI Configuration
AILANG Parse uses AILANG's AI effect — any model AILANG supports works:
AI usage is bounded by capability budgets (AI @limit=200 on main), so costs are predictable.
Dev Commands
Benchmarks
See benchmarks/ for details.
License
Apache 2.0