PaddleOCR-VL (paddleocr-vl)

paddleocr-vl parses one document page. It finds the layout blocks (text, title, table, formula, figure and more), recognises each block, and returns the blocks in reading order together with the whole page as Markdown. Tables are written as HTML tables and formulas as LaTeX.

Model ID	paddleocr-vl (default model of the endpoint)
Model	PaddleOCR-VL 1.6 (0.9B) with PP-DocLayoutV3 layout analysis (PaddlePaddle)
Weights	Official PaddleOCR-VL 1.6 (0.9B) and PP-DocLayoutV3 releases (PaddleOCR)
Use cases	Document parsing, Text recognition (OCR)
Endpoints	POST /v1/documents/parse
Pool	Paid: billed from the balance
Billing units	page. Units and prices: Billing
Licence	Apache-2.0

How it works

A call is a two-step pipeline on one page image: layout analysis first, then recognition of each block. The model therefore reads one region at a time instead of the whole page. Billing follows the page.

Layout analysis. PP-DocLayoutV3 cuts the page into blocks and gives each a type (text, title, table, formula, figure, caption, header, footer, list or other) and a box. The same step orders the blocks in reading order: a two-column page is read column by column.

Block recognition. Each block is passed to PaddleOCR-VL 1.6 (0.9B), a vision-language model that reads the block image and writes out its content: plain text, an HTML table, or the LaTeX of a formula. A block without text, such as a figure, has no text.

Assembly. The blocks are joined in reading order into the Markdown of the page. Figures are not returned as image files.

Recognition runs once per block, but a call is billed as one page, however many blocks the page has.

In each use case

Document parsing

paddleocr-vl is the default model of POST /v1/documents/parse, for invoices, papers, reports and book pages.

• Every region of the page is returned as a block with a type, an order (reading order, from 0, as the model determines it), a bbox, and the recognised text and markdown.
• Tables are HTML <table> elements, in both text and markdown. Display formulas are LaTeX delimited by $$; formulas inside a line of running text stay in the text and markdown of that block, delimited by $.
• The response also carries the whole page as markdown. With options.blocks set to false, blocks is omitted and only markdown is returned.
• One request is one page image, and pages is always 1. Multi-page PDF input is not available yet.

Use case guide and example call: Document parsing.

Text recognition (OCR)

paddleocr-vl reads text from any page image, but it returns blocks instead of plain lines. For screenshots, crops and copy-text OCR, ppocr-v6 is the low-cost choice.

Comparison with ppocr-v6: Text recognition (OCR).

Limits and notes

• One page image per call. Multi-page PDFs are not accepted yet.
• Image limits: see Images. Stack resizes the page for the model before recognition. All coordinates are pixels of the oriented original, whose size is returned as image.width and image.height.
• Latency: the recorded call (the example call of the use case page) had timing.processingMs of 1294 ms. The figure depends on the page, on queueing and on node load, and it is not a guarantee.