docspine 0.1.1

Pure-Rust Word (.docx / OOXML) structural parser with strong table support and local image OCR, via PyO3.

docspine

A pure-Rust Word (.docx) parser with Python bindings (PyO3 / maturin, abi3-py311). A .docx file is OOXML — a zip archive of XML parts — and docspine walks word/document.xml directly to produce a structured, information-preserving model: paragraphs (styled runs), tables (rows, cells, merges, fills, nesting), and embedded pictures. Tables are a first-class focus. Embedded images can additionally be OCR'd locally, offline, and deterministically via the sibling ocrspine crate (PP-OCRv5 through tract-onnx — no cloud, no network), and an image that is a table can be reconstructed into a grid from its OCR word boxes.

docspine is the document-engine sibling of pdfspine (PDF) and pptspine (PowerPoint), all sharing the same ocrspine OCR core.

Capabilities

Area	Status
Body blocks: paragraphs + tables in document order	parsed
Paragraphs: runs, text, style name, alignment, list level	parsed
Run styling: font, size, bold, italic, underline, color	parsed
Tables: rows, cells, cell paragraphs	parsed
Table merges: gridSpan (horizontal)	parsed
Table merges: vMerge restart / continue (vertical)	parsed
Nested tables (a table inside a cell)	parsed
Cell shading/fill, cell width (dxa), table grid columns	parsed
Row height, header rows	parsed
Embedded pictures: r:embed rel → media name + raw bytes + EMU extent	parsed
Image OCR (embedded pictures → words + boxes)	working (ocr_image)
Image-table reconstruction from OCR boxes → grid	working (reconstruct_image_table)
Legacy binary .doc (OLE/CFB)	probe + typed downgrade (full body deferred)

Parsing is tolerant: unknown elements are skipped, missing attributes become None, and malformed input yields a typed DocError rather than a panic.

docx first; legacy .doc deferred

Modern .docx (OOXML) is the primary target. The old binary .doc is a Microsoft compound document (OLE/CFB): rebuilding its body from the binary FIB + piece table is large, fiddly, and shares almost nothing with the docx path. So docspine ships detection + a clean typed downgrade today (a .doc byte stream yields DocUnsupportedError, and probe_doc reports the CFB streams when built with the legacy-doc feature); full .doc body reconstruction is a follow-up, not a blocker.

Install

pip install docspine

docspine is on PyPI. OCR works out of the box: the PP-OCRv5 weights ship in the shared ocrspine-models data package — a runtime dependency pip pulls in automatically — so a plain pip install docspine finds the OCR models with no extra setup (it no longer needs a sibling ../ocrspine/models checkout or OCRSPINE_MODELS). To build from source instead, see below.

Build (from the package root)

uv venv .venv
VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv" uv pip install maturin pytest
# Structural parsing needs no models. The OCR path resolves models from a
# sibling ../ocrspine/models by default (or set OCRSPINE_MODELS).
OCRSPINE_MODELS="$(cd ../ocrspine && pwd)/models" \
  VIRTUAL_ENV="$(pwd)/.venv" .venv/bin/maturin develop --release

Use from Python

import docspine

doc = docspine.open("report.docx")
print(doc.block_count)

for block in doc.body():            # list[dict], introspectable
    if block["kind"] == "paragraph":
        for run in block["runs"]:
            print(run["text"], run["bold"], run["color"])
    elif block["kind"] == "table":
        for row in block["rows"]:
            for cell in row["cells"]:
                print(cell["text"], "span", cell["grid_span"], cell["v_merge"])

# Run OCR on raw image bytes (PNG/JPEG), offline:
items = docspine.ocr_image(open("scan.png", "rb").read())
print(" ".join(i["text"] for i in items))

# Reconstruct a table that lives inside an image into a grid:
for table in docspine.reconstruct_image_table(open("table.png", "rb").read()):
    for cell in table["cells"]:
        print(cell["row"], cell["col"], cell["text"])

Rust workspace

crates/
  doc-core    domain model + geometry (twip/EMU) + typed DocError. No IO/zip/XML.
  doc-parse   OOXML reader: zip extract + quick-xml walk -> Document.
              Legacy binary .doc probing behind the `legacy-doc` feature.
  doc-ocr     image-OCR bridge over ocrspine (PaddleOcr) + image-table reconstruction.
  py-bindings PyO3 _core extension (the FFI chokepoint); `ocr` feature gates OCR.

Deferred / follow-up

• Full legacy binary .doc (OLE/CFB / [MS-DOC]) body reconstruction (FIB, piece table, CHPX/PAPX). Today: detection + typed downgrade + probe_doc.
• Richer styling (theme colors, styles.xml inheritance), headers/footers, footnotes/endnotes, comments, fields, hyperlinks targets, SmartArt/charts.