---
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 |
| **Package name** | `paddleocr-haystack` |

</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), click the **API** button, choose the example code for 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).

`raw_paddleocr_responses` can be useful while tuning layout thresholds, prompt settings, or Markdown post-processing options because it gives you access to the original API output alongside the converted Haystack documents.

:::note
This component returns Markdown content. Avoid piping it through `DocumentCleaner()` with its default settings because `remove_extra_whitespaces=True` and `remove_empty_lines=True` can collapse line breaks and flatten headings, tables, and image tags. For page-aware chunking, connect the converter directly to `DocumentSplitter`, or disable those options if you need custom cleanup.
:::

## When to use it

`PaddleOCRVLDocumentConverter` is a strong fit when you need more than plain OCR text:

- **Scanned PDFs and camera-captured documents** where page orientation and warped text can reduce extraction quality.
- **Layout-sensitive documents** such as invoices, reports, forms, and multi-column PDFs where preserving structure matters for downstream chunking and retrieval.
- **Tables, formulas, charts, or seals** where you want more targeted extraction behavior than plain text OCR.
- **RAG ingestion pipelines** where Markdown output is useful because headings, lists, tables, and page breaks can be preserved for later splitting.

## Useful configuration areas

The full parameter list is available in the [API reference](/reference/integrations-paddleocr). In practice, the most useful options tend to fall into these groups:

- **Input handling and image cleanup**: `file_type`, `use_doc_orientation_classify`, and `use_doc_unwarping` help when you mix PDFs and images or work with skewed scans and mobile photos.
- **Layout-aware extraction**: `use_layout_detection`, `layout_threshold`, `layout_nms`, `layout_unclip_ratio`, `layout_merge_bboxes_mode`, `layout_shape_mode`, and `merge_layout_blocks` help you tune how regions are detected and merged before Markdown is generated.
- **Content focus**: `prompt_label`, `use_ocr_for_image_block`, `use_chart_recognition`, and `use_seal_recognition` let you bias extraction toward a particular type of content, such as plain OCR, formulas, tables, charts, or seals.
- **Markdown output shaping**: `format_block_content`, `markdown_ignore_labels`, `prettify_markdown`, `show_formula_number`, `restructure_pages`, `merge_tables`, and `relevel_titles` help you control how much cleanup and restructuring happens before the result becomes a Haystack document.
- **VLM generation controls**: `repetition_penalty`, `temperature`, `top_p`, `min_pixels`, `max_pixels`, `max_new_tokens`, `vlm_extra_args`, and `additional_params` are useful when you need to trade off output quality, determinism, and cost.
- **Debugging and inspection**: `visualize=True` and the returned `raw_paddleocr_responses` are helpful when you are tuning extraction quality for a new document type.

## Typical scenarios

These settings are especially useful in a few common workflows:

- **Scanned contracts or receipts from phones**: start with `use_doc_orientation_classify=True` and `use_doc_unwarping=True`.
- **Table-heavy financial or operations PDFs**: consider `use_layout_detection=True`, `merge_tables=True`, and `restructure_pages=True`.
- **Formula-heavy documents**: use `prompt_label="formula"` together with `show_formula_number=True` if formula numbering matters in the final Markdown.
- **Mixed business documents with figures or seals**: enable `use_chart_recognition=True`, `use_seal_recognition=True`, or `use_ocr_for_image_block=True` depending on the content you want to preserve.

## 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"]
```

Advanced configuration for structure-heavy PDFs:

```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"),
    use_doc_orientation_classify=True,
    use_doc_unwarping=True,
    use_layout_detection=True,
    use_ocr_for_image_block=True,
    merge_tables=True,
    restructure_pages=True,
    prettify_markdown=True,
)

result = converter.run(sources=[Path("quarterly_report.pdf")])
documents = result["documents"]
raw_responses = result["raw_paddleocr_responses"]
```

### 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 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("splitter", DocumentSplitter(split_by="page", split_length=1))
pipeline.add_component("writer", DocumentWriter(document_store=document_store))

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

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