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Just want to run a parse? The Quickstart walks through the submit-and-poll flow end to end in Python, JavaScript, and cURL.
If you don’t yet know what’s important in a document, parsing is where you start. You hand the /parse endpoint a document (PDF, image, spreadsheet, or Office document) and it returns the whole thing broken into labeled layout regions: paragraphs, tables, figures, titles, captions, list items, headers, and footers. Tables stay in one piece, and reading order is preserved across multi-column layouts. That makes parsing the right operation for loading documents into a search index, an embedding store for RAG, or a long-term archive. For pulling specific fields out by name (invoice totals, contract dates, lab values), use Extraction instead.
Parsing a spreadsheet? Excel workbooks have their own pipeline and endpoint; see Excel Parsing. Submitting a .xls/.xlsx to /parse returns a 400 pointing you to POST /parse/excel.

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From a Dense Fund Filing to Structured Markdown

The page below is a real document we ran through /parse: a Schedule of Investments from the Calamos mutual funds’ 2023 annual report. It’s the kind of page standard parsers choke on, with two columns of holdings, each split into nested sub-tables (convertible bonds, sector-grouped preferred stocks, a government security, purchased options, and two forward foreign-currency-contract tables), threaded with footnote symbols, subtotals, and running totals. The filing also ships with a scrambled embedded text layer, so we parse it with ocr_strategy=force_ocr to take the text from OCR of the rendered page instead of the corrupt layer. The layout model handles the column structure itself: it detects the two columns and orders segments top to bottom within each, and for layouts that still come back out of order, the enhance_reading_order parameter re-sorts the segments explicitly. Parsing returns each column as its own table, with the sector groups, footnote markers, and totals intact.
Calamos Convertible Fund Schedule of Investments, a dense two-column mutual fund holdings page
Here’s a slice of the Markdown that comes back, showing the sector-grouped convertible preferred stocks with footnote symbols and subtotals preserved:

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What a Parse Returns

A successful parse organizes the document into chunks, each containing an array of segments:
  • A segment is a single labeled layout region: one paragraph, one table, one image. Each segment carries a bounding box, a segment_type (Text, Table, Picture, and others), a confidence score, and the region rendered as Markdown, HTML, and plain text. Tables and pictures also include word-level OCR boxes and a signed image URL for the cropped region.
  • A chunk groups one or more adjacent segments and includes an embed field with the chunk’s Markdown rolled into one string, ready to drop straight into a vector store.
See Response Format for the full field reference, and Element Types for the complete list of segment_type values.
Parsing forms or applications? Pass segmentation_version=v2 to run a form-aware layout model. It adds KeyValuePair segments that keep each printed label with the value filled in against it — including checkbox state — instead of scattering labels and values across separate Text segments.

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How a Parse Job Works

/parse is asynchronous. You submit the document and get back a job_id, then poll GET /parse/{job_id} until the status is Succeeded. Behind the scenes the parser runs OCR on every region, classifies each region’s type with a vision model, and reconstructs the reading order across the page. The Quickstart walks through the submit-and-poll flow in Python, JavaScript, and cURL. If your documents live in cloud storage (S3, GCS, Azure Blob, Supabase), you can skip the upload step and point /parse at a presigned URL instead.

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Dig Deeper

Element Types

The full list of segment_type values the parser returns.

Response Format

The canonical response shape with a field-by-field reference.

Processing Modes

Preset parameter bundles (Fast, Accurate, Agentic Lite, Agentic) and the parameters they set.

Presigned URLs

Parse documents straight from cloud storage.

Excel Parsing

The dedicated /parse/excel endpoint for .xls and .xlsx workbooks.
For the full request and response specification, see the Parse API reference.