document text extraction REST API

If you want a document text extraction REST API, here are a few common options and patterns depending on what you need.

1) Popular third-party APIs

These services can extract text from PDFs, images, scans, and office documents:

• Google Cloud Document AI
• AWS Textract
• Azure AI Document Intelligence
• OCR.space
• ABBYY Cloud OCR SDK
• Adobe PDF Extract API
• Mindee
• Nanonets

2) Typical REST API workflow

Most document extraction APIs work like this:

Upload document

POST /extract
Content-Type: multipart/form-data

Example response

{
  "text": "Extracted document text here...",
  "pages": [
    {
      "page": 1,
      "text": "..."
    }
  ]
}

3) Example: simple custom REST API

If you want to build your own, a common setup is:

Endpoint

POST /api/v1/document-text

Request

• multipart/form-data
• file field: file

Response

{
  "documentId": "12345",
  "status": "completed",
  "text": "Hello world from the document"
}

4) Example using OCR + parsing

A robust service usually does:

1. Accept file upload
2. Detect file type
3. If PDF text-based, extract text directly
4. If scanned/image-based, run OCR
5. Return raw text and optionally structured fields

5) Python FastAPI example

from fastapi import FastAPI, UploadFile, File
import pytesseract
from PIL import Image
import pdfplumber
import io

app = FastAPI()

@app.post("/extract")
async def extract_text(file: UploadFile = File(...)):
    content = await file.read()

    if file.filename.lower().endswith(".pdf"):
        text = ""
        with pdfplumber.open(io.BytesIO(content)) as pdf:
            for page in pdf.pages:
                text += page.extract_text() or ""
        return {"text": text}

    image = Image.open(io.BytesIO(content))
    text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
    return {"text": text}

6) If you want API design recommendations

A good text extraction REST API usually supports:

• POST /documents — upload file
• GET /documents/{id} — job status
• GET /documents/{id}/text — extracted text
• GET /documents/{id}/fields — structured data if needed

If you want, I can provide:

1. a full REST API spec,
2. a FastAPI/Node.js implementation, or
3. a comparison of OCR/document extraction services.