Multi-Format Support

LiteParse automatically converts non-PDF formats to PDF before parsing. This lets you use the same parsing pipeline for Office documents, images, and more.

Supported formats

Office documents (via LibreOffice)

Category	Extensions
Word	.doc, .docx, .docm, .odt, .rtf
PowerPoint	.ppt, .pptx, .pptm, .odp
Spreadsheets	.xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, .ods, .csv, .tsv

Images (via ImageMagick)

.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .bmp, .tiff, .webp, .svg

Images are converted to PDF and then parsed with OCR to extract text.

Installing dependencies

Format conversion uses standard system tools. Install the ones you need:

LibreOffice (for Office documents)

# macOS
brew install --cask libreoffice

# Ubuntu/Debian
apt-get install libreoffice

# Windows
choco install libreoffice-fresh

On Windows, you may need to add the LibreOffice CLI directory (typically C:\Program Files\LibreOffice\program) to your PATH and restart.

ImageMagick (for images)

# macOS
brew install imagemagick

# Ubuntu/Debian
apt-get install imagemagick

# Windows
choco install imagemagick.app

Usage

Once the dependencies are installed, just pass any supported file to lit parse:

lit parse report.docx
lit parse slides.pptx --format json
lit parse spreadsheet.xlsx -o output.txt
lit parse scan.png

Batch mode also handles mixed formats:

lit batch-parse ./documents ./output --recursive

How it works

1. LiteParse detects the file extension
2. If it’s not a PDF, it converts to PDF using the appropriate tool (LibreOffice or ImageMagick)
3. The resulting PDF is parsed normally
4. Temporary conversion files are cleaned up automatically

If the required conversion tool isn’t installed, LiteParse will return an error explaining which dependency is needed.