DocFrame

DocFrame is a Python framework for turning messy enterprise documents into structured, AI-ready chunks.

It gives developers one API and one CLI for PDFs, Word files, CSVs, Excel workbooks, JPGs, and PNGs.

docframe process contract.pdf --format markdown
docframe process ./inbox --recursive --out normalized.json
python3 -m docframe process report.xlsx

Why DocFrame

Document workflows usually start with format chaos: text PDFs, scanned images, spreadsheets, Word files, CSV exports, and ad hoc attachments. DocFrame gives you a normalized result model so downstream systems can search, extract, summarize, validate, and route documents without rewriting parsers for every file type.

Install

From PyPI:

python3 -m pip install docframe-ai

Local development:

python3 -m pip install -e .

Then:

docframe formats
docframe process examples/sample.csv --format markdown

The PyPI distribution is docframe-ai; the Python import remains docframe. See the repository's PyPI publishing guide for the GitHub Trusted Publishing setup.

Python API

import docframe as df

framework = df.DocFrame()
result = framework.process_sync("examples/sample.csv")

print(result.metadata.document_type)
print(result.chunks[0].rows)

Async processing:

import docframe as df

framework = df.DocFrame()
results = await framework.process_many(["contract.pdf", "report.xlsx"])

Safe corpus processing:

import docframe as df

framework = df.DocFrame()
results = await framework.process_many(
    ["good.pdf", "malformed.pdf"],
    continue_on_error=True,
)

for result in results:
    if result.errors:
        print(result.metadata.filename, result.errors)

Supported Formats

• PDF: text and page metadata via pypdf
• DOCX: paragraphs and tables via direct OOXML package parsing
• DOC: OOXML extraction when possible, metadata-only fallback for legacy binary Word files
• CSV: table chunks via Python's standard csv parser
• XLSX/XLSM: worksheet tables via openpyxl
• JPG/JPEG/PNG: image metadata via Pillow

Images currently emit image chunks and metadata. OCR is intentionally a provider extension point so teams can choose local OCR, cloud OCR, or multimodal AI.

Many real corpora contain OOXML Word documents with a .doc extension. DocFrame extracts those with the Word adapter and emits a warning. True legacy binary .doc files emit metadata and a warning; convert them to .docx or register a custom adapter when full text extraction is required.

Core Concepts

• DocFrame: framework object for processing documents
• DocumentAdapter: parser for a file family
• AdapterRegistry: maps file extensions to adapters
• DocumentResult: normalized output for one document
• DocumentChunk: text, table, image, or metadata unit
• Pipeline: ordered post-processing steps
• ProcessingOptions: runtime limits and concurrency controls for large files

CLI

docframe process FILE_OR_DIRECTORY
docframe process FILE_OR_DIRECTORY --format markdown
docframe process FILE_OR_DIRECTORY --recursive --out normalized.json
docframe formats

Status

DocFrame is public alpha software. The core API, adapters, CLI, tests, MIT license, and landing site are in place. See PUBLIC_ALPHA.md for the production-readiness checklist.

Verify

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests
python3 -m compileall docframe tests

Website

The static site lives in site/index.html.

Run it locally:

python3 -m http.server 8080 -d site

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/

Deploy Static Site On Render

The repository includes a Render Blueprint in render.yaml. It publishes the static site from site/ as docframe-site.

After pushing the repository to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket:

git push -u origin main

Then create the Blueprint from the Render Dashboard:

https://dashboard.render.com/blueprint/new

Connect the repository and Render will use render.yaml from the repo root.

Corpus Utilities

Validate a private corpus before a release:

python3 scripts/validate_corpus.py test_corpus --out corpus-report.json

The validator exits nonzero if any supported file produces a structured error. Use --allow-errors for exploratory runs where malformed files are expected.

Collect any supported corpus files by extension:

python3 scripts/collect_files.py "/path/to/archive" "/path/to/all_csv" --ext csv --dry-run --quiet
python3 scripts/collect_files.py "/path/to/archive" "/path/to/all_csv" --ext csv --quiet
python3 scripts/collect_files.py "/path/to/archive" "/path/to/all_images" --ext jpg --ext png --quiet

Collect PDFs from a deeply nested archive into one flat folder:

python3 scripts/collect_pdfs.py "/path/to/archive" "/path/to/all_pdfs" --dry-run --quiet
python3 scripts/collect_pdfs.py "/path/to/archive" "/path/to/all_pdfs" --quiet

The collector copies by default, avoids overwriting existing files, and gives duplicate basenames a stable hash suffix.