---
title: "PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter"
id: paddleocrvldocumentconverter
slug: "/paddleocrvldocumentconverter"
description: "`PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter` extracts text from documents using PaddleOCR's large model document parsing API."
---

# PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter

`PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter` extracts text from documents using PaddleOCR's large model document parsing API. PaddleOCR-VL is used behind the scenes. For more information, please refer to the [PaddleOCR-VL documentation](https://www.paddleocr.ai/latest/en/version3.x/algorithm/PaddleOCR-VL/PaddleOCR-VL.html).

<div className="key-value-table">

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| **Most common position in a pipeline** | Before [PreProcessors](../preprocessors.mdx), or right at the beginning of an indexing pipeline |
| **Mandatory init variables** | `api_url`: The URL of the PaddleOCR-VL API. <br /> <br /> `access_token`: The AI Studio access token. Can be set with `AISTUDIO_ACCESS_TOKEN` environment variable. |
| **Mandatory run variables** | `sources`: A list of image or PDF file paths or ByteStream objects. |
| **Output variables** | `documents`: A list of documents. <br /> <br />`raw_paddleocr_responses`: A list of raw OCR responses from PaddleOCR API. |
| **API reference** | [PaddleOCR](/reference/integrations-paddleocr) |
| **GitHub link** | https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack-core-integrations/tree/main/integrations/paddleocr |

</div>

## Overview

The `PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter` takes a list of document sources and uses PaddleOCR's large model document parsing API to extract text from images and PDFs. It supports both images and PDF files.

The component returns one Haystack [`Document`](../../concepts/data-classes.mdx#document) per source, with all pages concatenated using form feed characters (`\f`) as separators. This format ensures compatibility with Haystack's [`DocumentSplitter`](../preprocessors/documentsplitter.mdx) for accurate page-wise splitting and overlap handling. The content is returned in markdown format, with images represented as `![img-id](img-id)` tags.

The component takes `api_url` as a required parameter. To obtain the API URL, visit the [PaddleOCR official website](https://aistudio.baidu.com/paddleocr/task), click the **API** button in the upper-left corner, choose the example code for **Large Model document parsing(PaddleOCR-VL)**, and copy the `API_URL`.

By default, the component uses the `AISTUDIO_ACCESS_TOKEN` environment variable for authentication. You can also pass an `access_token` at initialization. The AI Studio access token can be obtained from [this page](https://aistudio.baidu.com/account/accessToken).

## Usage

You need to install the `paddleocr-haystack` integration to use `PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter`:

```shell
pip install paddleocr-haystack
```

### On its own

Basic usage with a local file:

```python
from pathlib import Path
from haystack.utils import Secret
from haystack_integrations.components.converters.paddleocr import (
    PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter,
)

converter = PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter(
    api_url="<your-api-url>",
    access_token=Secret.from_env_var("AISTUDIO_ACCESS_TOKEN"),
)

result = converter.run(sources=[Path("my_document.pdf")])
documents = result["documents"]
```

### In a pipeline

Here's an example of an indexing pipeline that processes PDFs with OCR and writes them to a Document Store:

```python
from haystack import Pipeline
from haystack.document_stores.in_memory import InMemoryDocumentStore
from haystack.components.preprocessors import DocumentCleaner, DocumentSplitter
from haystack.components.writers import DocumentWriter
from haystack.utils import Secret
from haystack_integrations.components.converters.paddleocr import (
    PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter,
)

document_store = InMemoryDocumentStore()

pipeline = Pipeline()
pipeline.add_component(
    "converter",
    PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter(
        api_url="<your-api-url>",
        access_token=Secret.from_env_var("AISTUDIO_ACCESS_TOKEN"),
    ),
)
pipeline.add_component("cleaner", DocumentCleaner())
pipeline.add_component("splitter", DocumentSplitter(split_by="page", split_length=1))
pipeline.add_component("writer", DocumentWriter(document_store=document_store))

pipeline.connect("converter", "cleaner")
pipeline.connect("cleaner", "splitter")
pipeline.connect("splitter", "writer")

file_paths = ["invoice.pdf", "receipt.jpg", "contract.pdf"]
pipeline.run({"converter": {"sources": file_paths}})
```
