Chandra is an OCR model that outputs markdown, HTML, and JSON. It is highly accurate at extracting text from images and PDFs, while preserving layout information.

You can try Chandra in the free playground here, or at a hosted API here.

Features

Convert documents to markdown, html, or json with detailed layout information
Good handwriting support
Reconstructs forms accurately, including checkboxes
Good support for tables, math, and complex layouts
Extracts images and diagrams, with captions and structured data
Support for 40+ languages

Quickstart

The easiest way to start is with the CLI tools:

shell

pip install chandra-ocr

# With VLLM
chandra_vllm
chandra input.pdf ./output

# With HuggingFace
chandra input.pdf ./output --method hf

# Interactive streamlit app
chandra_app

Benchmarks

We used the olmocr benchmark, which seems to be the most reliable current OCR benchmark in our testing.

Model	ArXiv	Old Scans Math	Tables	Old Scans	Headers and Footers	Multi column	Long tiny text	Base	Overall	Source
Datalab Chandra v0.1.0	82.2	80.3	88.0	50.4	90.8	81.2	92.3	99.9	83.1 ± 0.9	Own benchmarks
Datalab Marker v1.10.0	83.8	69.7	74.8	32.3	86.6	79.4	85.7	99.6	76.5 ± 1.0	Own benchmarks
Mistral OCR API	77.2	67.5	60.6	29.3	93.6	71.3	77.1	99.4	72.0 ± 1.1	olmocr repo
Deepseek OCR	75.2	72.3	79.7	33.3	96.1	66.7	80.1	99.7	75.4 ± 1.0	Own benchmarks
GPT-4o (Anchored)	53.5	74.5	70.0	40.7	93.8	69.3	60.6	96.8	69.9 ± 1.1	olmocr repo
Gemini Flash 2 (Anchored)	54.5	56.1	72.1	34.2	64.7	61.5	71.5	95.6	63.8 ± 1.2	olmocr repo
Qwen 3 VL	70.2	75.1	45.6	37.5	89.1	62.1	43.0	94.3	64.6 ± 1.1	Own benchmarks
olmOCR v0.3.0	78.6	79.9	72.9	43.9	95.1	77.3	81.2	98.9	78.5 ± 1.1	olmocr repo
dots.ocr	82.1	64.2	88.3	40.9	94.1	82.4	81.2	99.5	79.1 ± 1.0	dots.ocr repo

Examples

Type	Name	Link
Tables	Water Damage Form	View
Tables	10K Filing	View
Forms	Handwritten Form	View
Forms	Lease Agreement	View
Handwriting	Doctor Note	View
Handwriting	Math Homework	View
Books	Geography Textbook	View
Books	Exercise Problems	View
Math	Attention Diagram	View
Math	Worksheet	View
Math	EGA Page	View
Newspapers	New York Times	View
Newspapers	LA Times	View
Other	Transcript	View
Other	Flowchart	View

Usage

Installation

pip install chandra-ocr

From code

python

from chandra.model import InferenceManager
from chandra.model.schema import BatchInputItem

# Run chandra_vllm to start a vLLM server first if you pass vllm, else pass hf
# you can also start your own vllm server with the datalab-to/chandra model
manager = InferenceManager(method="vllm")
batch = [
    BatchInputItem(
        image=PIL_IMAGE,
        prompt_type="ocr_layout"
    )
]
result = manager.generate(batch)[0]
print(result.markdown)

With transformers

python

from transformers import AutoModel, AutoProcessor
from chandra.model.hf import generate_hf
from chandra.model.schema import BatchInputItem
from chandra.output import parse_markdown

model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("datalab-to/chandra").cuda()
model.processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained("datalab-to/chandra")

batch = [
    BatchInputItem(
        image=PIL_IMAGE,
        prompt_type="ocr_layout"
    )
]

result = generate_hf(batch, model)[0]
markdown = parse_markdown(result.raw)

Credits

Thank you to the following open source projects: