Extraction and OCR

March 14, 2026 · View on GitHub

Use these patterns when the goal is to pull machine-readable data from PDFs or scans.

Extract plain text

curl -X POST https://api.nutrient.io/build \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NUTRIENT_API_KEY" \
  -F document.pdf=@document.pdf \
  -F 'instructions={"parts":[{"file":"document.pdf"}],"output":{"type":"text"}}' \
  -o extracted.txt

Extract tables

curl -X POST https://api.nutrient.io/build \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NUTRIENT_API_KEY" \
  -F document.pdf=@document.pdf \
  -F 'instructions={"parts":[{"file":"document.pdf"}],"actions":[{"type":"extraction","strategy":"tables"}],"output":{"type":"xlsx"}}' \
  -o tables.xlsx

Common structured outputs: xlsx, json, xml, csv

Extract key-value pairs

curl -X POST https://api.nutrient.io/build \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NUTRIENT_API_KEY" \
  -F document.pdf=@document.pdf \
  -F 'instructions={"parts":[{"file":"document.pdf"}],"actions":[{"type":"extraction","strategy":"key-values"}],"output":{"type":"json"}}' \
  -o pairs.json

Basic OCR

curl -X POST https://api.nutrient.io/build \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NUTRIENT_API_KEY" \
  -F scanned.pdf=@scanned.pdf \
  -F 'instructions={"parts":[{"file":"scanned.pdf"}],"actions":[{"type":"ocr","language":"english"}]}' \
  -o searchable.pdf

Multi-language OCR

{
  "parts": [{ "file": "scanned.pdf" }],
  "actions": [{ "type": "ocr", "language": ["english", "german", "french"] }]
}

OCR on images

curl -X POST https://api.nutrient.io/build \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NUTRIENT_API_KEY" \
  -F scan.jpg=@scan.jpg \
  -F 'instructions={"parts":[{"file":"scan.jpg"}],"actions":[{"type":"ocr","language":"english"}]}' \
  -o searchable.pdf

OCR languages

Common OCR languages include:

english
german
french
spanish
italian
portuguese
dutch
swedish
polish
czech
turkish
japanese
korean
chinese-simplified
chinese-traditional
arabic
hebrew
hindi
russian

OCR and extraction rules

OCR before extraction when text is image-only, unselectable, or suspiciously sparse.
Tables and key-values benefit from cleaner scans and correct page orientation.
For multilingual inputs, pass an array of languages rather than guessing a single language.
If OCR quality is poor, fix source orientation and scan quality before retrying.