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docparser/Installation

Installation

Install rc-docparser from PyPI — a small MIT core plus opt-in extras for PDFs, OCR, tables, and VLM captioning.

docparser is published on PyPI as rc-docparser. The core install is intentionally small and MIT-licensed; higher-fidelity and heavier features are separate opt-in extras. It requires Python 3.10+.

Core install

pip install rc-docparser              # core: docx + xlsx + txt/md + csv/tsv

The Python import name is docparser:

import docparser

Format extras

Add the formats you need:

pip install 'rc-docparser[pdf]'       # + PyMuPDF for PDFs
pip install 'rc-docparser[html]'      # + trafilatura + bs4 for HTML
pip install 'rc-docparser[pptx]'      # + python-pptx for PowerPoint
pip install 'rc-docparser[epub]'      # + EbookLib + bs4 for EPUB
pip install 'rc-docparser[vlm]'       # + requests for API VLM captions
pip install 'rc-docparser[all]'       # everything above (recommended)

Higher-fidelity extras

These pull in heavier (and sometimes differently-licensed) dependencies, so they stay opt-in:

pip install 'rc-docparser[tables]'       # + pdfplumber for PDF table extraction
pip install 'rc-docparser[ocr]'          # + rapidocr-onnxruntime for scanned PDFs
pip install 'rc-docparser[pymupdf4llm]'  # PyMuPDF4LLM PDF backend (AGPL/commercial)
pip install 'rc-docparser[docling]'      # IBM Docling PDF backend (MIT)
pip install 'rc-docparser[marker]'       # Datalab Marker PDF backend (GPL-3.0)
pip install 'rc-docparser[localvlm]'     # transformers/torch local captioning
License-aware extras

The core is MIT, but some PDF backends carry stronger licenses — pymupdf4llm (AGPL/commercial), marker (GPL-3.0). Pick the backend that matches your distribution requirements. See PDF backends & OCR.

From source (development)

git clone https://github.com/Research-Commons/docparser
cd docparser
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
pytest -ra
ruff check src tests
mypy

Next

Continue to the Quickstart, or jump to the CLI.