Content
# Kreuzberg
[](https://discord.gg/pXxagNK2zN)
[](https://badge.fury.io/py/kreuzberg)
[](https://kreuzberg.dev/)
[](https://benchmarks.kreuzberg.dev/)
[](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
[](https://app.deepsource.com/gh/Goldziher/kreuzberg/)
**A document intelligence framework for Python.** Extract text, metadata, and structured information from diverse document formats through a unified, extensible API. Built on established open source foundations including Pandoc, PDFium, and Tesseract.
📖 **[Complete Documentation](https://kreuzberg.dev/)**
## Framework Overview
### Document Intelligence Capabilities
- **Text Extraction**: High-fidelity text extraction preserving document structure and formatting
- **Image Extraction**: Extract embedded images from PDFs, presentations, HTML, and Office documents with optional OCR
- **Metadata Extraction**: Comprehensive metadata including author, creation date, language, and document properties
- **Format Support**: 21 document types including PDF, Microsoft Office, images, HTML, and structured data formats
- **OCR Integration**: Tesseract OCR with markdown output (default) and table extraction from scanned documents
- **Document Classification**: Automatic document type detection (contracts, forms, invoices, receipts, reports)
### Technical Architecture
- **Performance**: Highest throughput among Python document processing frameworks (30+ docs/second)
- **Resource Efficiency**: 71MB installation, ~360MB runtime memory footprint
- **Extensibility**: Plugin architecture for custom extractors via the Extractor base class
- **API Design**: Synchronous and asynchronous APIs with consistent interfaces
- **Type Safety**: Complete type annotations throughout the codebase
### Open Source Foundation
Kreuzberg leverages established open source technologies:
- **Pandoc**: Universal document converter for robust format support
- **PDFium**: Google's PDF rendering engine for accurate PDF processing
- **Tesseract**: Google's OCR engine for text recognition
- **Python-docx/pptx**: Native Microsoft Office format support
## Quick Start
### Extract Text with CLI
```bash
# Extract text from any file to text format
uvx kreuzberg extract document.pdf > output.txt
# With all features (chunking, language detection, etc.)
uvx kreuzberg extract invoice.pdf --ocr-backend tesseract --output-format text
# Extract with rich metadata
uvx kreuzberg extract report.pdf --show-metadata --output-format json
```
### Python Usage
**Async (recommended for web apps):**
```python
from kreuzberg import extract_file
# In your async function
result = await extract_file("presentation.pptx")
print(result.content)
# Rich metadata extraction
print(f"Title: {result.metadata.title}")
print(f"Author: {result.metadata.author}")
print(f"Page count: {result.metadata.page_count}")
print(f"Created: {result.metadata.created_at}")
```
**Sync (for scripts and CLI tools):**
```python
from kreuzberg import extract_file_sync
result = extract_file_sync("report.docx")
print(result.content)
# Access rich metadata
print(f"Language: {result.metadata.language}")
print(f"Word count: {result.metadata.word_count}")
print(f"Keywords: {result.metadata.keywords}")
```
### Docker
Two optimized images available:
```bash
# Base image (API + CLI + multilingual OCR)
docker run -p 8000:8000 goldziher/kreuzberg
# Core image (+ chunking + crypto + document classification + language detection)
docker run -p 8000:8000 goldziher/kreuzberg-core:latest
# Extract via API
curl -X POST -F "file=@document.pdf" http://localhost:8000/extract
```
📖 **[Installation Guide](https://kreuzberg.dev/getting-started/installation/)** • **[CLI Documentation](https://kreuzberg.dev/cli/)** • **[API Reference](https://kreuzberg.dev/api-reference/)**
## Deployment Options
### 🤖 MCP Server (AI Integration)
**Add to Claude Desktop with one command:**
```bash
claude mcp add kreuzberg uvx kreuzberg-mcp
```
**Or configure manually in `claude_desktop_config.json`:**
```json
{
"mcpServers": {
"kreuzberg": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["kreuzberg-mcp"]
}
}
}
```
**MCP capabilities:**
- Extract text from PDFs, images, Office docs, and more
- Multilingual OCR support with Tesseract
- Metadata parsing and language detection
📖 **[MCP Documentation](https://kreuzberg.dev/user-guide/mcp-server/)**
## Supported Formats
| Category | Formats |
| ------------------- | ------------------------------ |
| **Documents** | PDF, DOCX, DOC, RTF, TXT, EPUB |
| **Images** | JPG, PNG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, WEBP |
| **Spreadsheets** | XLSX, XLS, CSV, ODS |
| **Presentations** | PPTX, PPT, ODP |
| **Web** | HTML, XML, MHTML |
| **Structured Data** | JSON, YAML, TOML |
| **Archives** | Support via extraction |
## 📊 Performance Characteristics
[View comprehensive benchmarks](https://benchmarks.kreuzberg.dev/) • [Benchmark methodology](https://github.com/Goldziher/python-text-extraction-libs-benchmarks) • [**Detailed Analysis**](https://kreuzberg.dev/performance-analysis/)
### Technical Specifications
| Metric | Kreuzberg Sync | Kreuzberg Async | Benchmarked |
| ---------------------------- | -------------- | --------------- | ------------------ |
| **Throughput (tiny files)** | 31.78 files/s | 23.94 files/s | Highest throughput |
| **Throughput (small files)** | 8.91 files/s | 9.31 files/s | Highest throughput |
| **Memory footprint** | 359.8 MB | 395.2 MB | Lowest usage |
| **Installation size** | 71 MB | 71 MB | Smallest size |
| **Success rate** | 100% | 100% | Perfect |
| **Supported formats** | 18 | 18 | Comprehensive |
### Architecture Advantages
- **Native C extensions**: Built on PDFium and Tesseract for maximum performance
- **Async/await support**: True asynchronous processing with intelligent task scheduling
- **Memory efficiency**: Streaming architecture minimizes memory allocation
- **Process pooling**: Automatic multiprocessing for CPU-intensive operations
- **Optimized data flow**: Efficient data handling with minimal transformations
> **Benchmark details**: Tests include PDFs, Word docs, HTML, images, and spreadsheets in multiple languages (English, Hebrew, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean) on standardized hardware.
## Documentation
### Quick Links
- [Installation Guide](https://kreuzberg.dev/getting-started/installation/) - Setup and dependencies
- [User Guide](https://kreuzberg.dev/user-guide/) - Comprehensive usage guide
- [Performance Analysis](https://kreuzberg.dev/performance-analysis/) - Detailed benchmark results
- [API Reference](https://kreuzberg.dev/api-reference/) - Complete API documentation
- [Docker Guide](https://kreuzberg.dev/user-guide/docker/) - Container deployment
- [REST API](https://kreuzberg.dev/user-guide/api-server/) - HTTP endpoints
- [CLI Guide](https://kreuzberg.dev/cli/) - Command-line usage
- [OCR Configuration](https://kreuzberg.dev/user-guide/ocr-configuration/) - OCR engine setup
## License
MIT License - see [LICENSE](LICENSE) for details.
