#3333rd of 60 in Data and scraping for AIFor data and documents, documents and ocr
textract
Python library and CLI that extracts text from many document formats
- Stars
- 4.7k
- License
- MIT
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Last release
- Sep 2026
- Language
- HTML
4,504 on 21 Apr 20264,734 on 10 Nov 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
textract extracts plain text from documents through a single Python interface and command line. The README gives only a one-line description and a link to the full documentation on Read the Docs, so supported formats and system dependencies are not listed there. It does not use models itself; it prepares document text for downstream use.
Who it is for: Python developers who need plain text from mixed document types
Strengths
- Published on PyPI, so installation is a standard pip install
- MIT license
- Full documentation hosted on Read the Docs
- Latest release dated 2026-09-01, with recent commits
Weaknesses
- README has no usage example or install instructions
- README badges point to Travis CI, which suggests dated CI config
- Plain text extraction only per README; no layout or table output described
What it needs
- no GPU
- Docker
What changed
From the release notes. No flag means the note does not say so, not that the upgrade is safe.
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