Unstructured-IO / Unstructured-IO/unstructured

Request for Slimmed-Down PDF Extraction Interface (Exclude Unused OCR Addons)

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Description

Hi Unstructured team,

First of all, thanks for the great work on this library!

We’re currently using unstructured for PDF extraction, but not relying on any OCR-related functionality. However, we’ve noticed that the PDF dependencies, especially those related to OCR (like Tesseract, poppler, etc.), significantly inflate our Docker image size—by several GBs.

For our use case, this additional bloat isn’t necessary and is becoming a challenge for deployment.

Would it be possible to provide a slimmer version of the PDF interface or a way to install it without the OCR-heavy dependencies? For example:
• A minimal set of requirements for “text-only” PDF extraction.
• Optional installation flags/extras to include or exclude OCR support.
• A stripped-down Dockerfile as a reference for lean builds.

We’d be happy to help test or contribute to this effort if needed.

Thanks!

Contributor guide

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by examining how the PDF interface currently installs its dependencies, with particular attention to the OCR-related Tesseract and poppler requirements. Compare the existing installation options and Docker setup against a text-only path. Done means a documented, testable way to install or build PDF extraction without the unnecessary OCR dependencies.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
docker
Domain
devops
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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