Variable Layout Document Handling

via “layout-aware document structure analysis”

IBM's document converter — PDFs, DOCX to structured markdown with OCR and table extraction.

Unique: Preserves 2D spatial relationships and visual hierarchy in the output AST, allowing downstream consumers to reconstruct original layout rather than losing positional information during text extraction

vs others: More layout-aware than simple text extraction tools (pdfplumber) because it models spatial relationships; more deterministic than vision-LLM approaches (GPT-4V) because it uses rule-based layout detection without API calls

via “variable-layout-document-handling”