Documents

Introduction

Retab offers a consolidated, production-grade pipeline for processing any types of documents with AI.

Our model read documents the way humans do. It accepts native digital files (Images, PDFs, DOCX, XLSX, E-mail) and parses text, detects visual structure across pages, tables, forms, and figures.

Please check the API Reference for more details.

The SDK exposes document processing through dedicated resources:

Resource	Purpose
client.extractions.create	Executes the extraction and returns the parsed object (optionally with consensus voting). One-step OCR + LLM parsing when only the structured output is required.
client.parses.create	Converts any document into structured text content with page-by-page extraction. Perfect for RAG, text extraction, and preparing documents for further processing or indexing.
client.edits.create	Automatically detects form fields in PDFs using OCR and LLM, then fills them based on natural language instructions. Ideal for automated form completion workflows.
client.splits.create	Analyzes multi-page documents and classifies pages into user-defined subdocuments, returning the assigned pages for each section. Perfect for separating mixed document batches and organizing content by type.
client.classifications.create	Classifies a document against user-defined categories.

The complexities of OCR, layout reconstruction are handled internally, allowing to focus solely on downstream prompt and context-engineering logic.

The document data structure

Documents in Retab are represented as MIMEData objects, which encapsulate the file content and metadata. This structure allows you to work with documents in a consistent way regardless of their original format. The url field directly matches OpenAI’s expected format for image inputs.

MIMEData Object Structure · object

Show document

filename · string

The original filename of the document.

url · string

A data URL containing the base64-encoded content of the document, prefixed with the appropriate MIME type.

MIMEData Object Structure

{
  "document": {
    "filename": "Alphabet-10Q-Q1-25.pdf",
    "url": "data:application/pdf;base64,JVBERi0xLjQKJfbk/N8KMSAwIG9iago8PAovVHlwZS…"
  }
}

The python SDK is flexible and allows you to use the document parameter as a file path, bytes, or a PIL.Image.Image object, and we will automatically convert it to a MIMEData object for you.