Quickstart

Parse your first document with LiteParse in under a minute, using the CLI or the Node.js library.

CLI

1. Install the CLI

   Install the lit command globally:

   npm

   npm install -g @llamaindex/liteparse
   

   Verify the install:

   lit --version
   
2. Parse your first document

   Pass any PDF (or supported document format) to lit parse:

   lit parse document.pdf
   

   Output is printed to stdout as plain text with the spatial layout preserved. To save it to a file:

   lit parse document.pdf -o output.txt
   

   Pipe a remote PDF directly without downloading it first:

   curl -sL https://example.com/report.pdf | lit parse -
   
3. Try JSON output

   Use --format json to get structured output with per-page text items and bounding boxes:

   lit parse document.pdf --format json -o output.json
   

Library

1. Install the package

   Add LiteParse as a dependency:

   npm

   npm install @llamaindex/liteparse
   
2. Parse a file

   Import LiteParse and call parse() with a file path:

   import { LiteParse } from '@llamaindex/liteparse';
   
   const parser = new LiteParse({ ocrEnabled: true });
   const result = await parser.parse('document.pdf');
   console.log(result.text);
   

   result.text contains the full document text with spatial layout preserved across all pages. Per-page data is available in result.pages.

3. Parse from a Buffer or Uint8Array

   You can pass raw bytes instead of a file path. PDF bytes go straight to the parser with zero disk I/O; non-PDF bytes are written to a temp file for format conversion.

   From disk

   import { LiteParse } from '@llamaindex/liteparse';
   import { readFile } from 'fs/promises';
   
   const parser = new LiteParse();
   
   const pdfBytes = await readFile('document.pdf');
   const result = await parser.parse(pdfBytes);
   console.log(result.text);
   

   From HTTP

   import { LiteParse } from '@llamaindex/liteparse';
   
   const parser = new LiteParse();
   
   const response = await fetch('https://example.com/document.pdf');
   const buffer = Buffer.from(await response.arrayBuffer());
   const result = await parser.parse(buffer);
   console.log(result.text);
   
4. Get structured JSON output

   Set outputFormat: 'json' to receive per-page text items with coordinates and font metadata:

   import { LiteParse } from '@llamaindex/liteparse';
   
   const parser = new LiteParse({ outputFormat: 'json' });
   const result = await parser.parse('document.pdf');
   
   for (const page of result.json.pages) {
     console.log(`Page ${page.page}: ${page.textItems.length} text items`);
     for (const item of page.textItems) {
       console.log(`  "${item.text}" at (${item.x}, ${item.y})`);
     }
   }
   

   Each textItem includes text, x, y, width, height, fontName, and fontSize.

OCR is enabled by default using the built-in Tesseract.js engine — no setup required. On the first run, Tesseract downloads language data from the internet. For offline use, set TESSDATA_PREFIX to a directory containing pre-downloaded .traineddata files.

Next steps

Library usage

Explore the full LiteParse API: configuration options, OCR setup, screenshot generation, and more.

CLI reference

Full reference for lit parse, lit batch-parse, and lit screenshot commands and all their flags.