v6.0.1 - 02.01.2026

[harshankur]

v6.0.1 - 02.01.2026

Changes: v5.2.2..v6.0.1

We are thrilled to announce the release of officeParser v6.0.1, a major overhaul that transforms the library from a simple text extractor into a powerful, format-agnostic document analysis engine.

🌟 Key Highlights (v6.0.0+)

🌳 Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) Output

The core parsing engine now produces a rich, hierarchical Abstract Syntax Tree. This allows you to traverse documents structurally—accessing paragraphs, headings, tables, and lists with their original nesting and metadata preserved.

🖼️ OCR & Attachment Extraction

• Integrated OCR: Use Tesseract.js to extract text from images and scanned PDF documents automatically. (Fixes Doesn't work for PDFs that are scans of paper documents (each page is an image) #57)
• Base64 Attachments: Extract images and charts directly as Base64 strings from all supported formats. (Fixes Feature to extract images from Documents #68)

📄 New Format Support & Improvements

• RTF Support: Added full support for Rich Text Format (.rtf) files, including complex nested tables and lists. (Fixes Add support for *.rtf files #54)
• Hierarchical PDF Parsing: PDFs are now split into logical page nodes, matching the structure of slides and sheets.
• PowerPoint & Excel Nodes: Introduced dedicated slide and sheet delimiter nodes for cleaner visualization and processing. (Fixes Feature Request: Add slide delimiter support for PowerPoint files #64)

🔗 Enhanced Hyperlinks

• Extract Link Addresses: External hyperlinks are now correctly extracted and tagged in the AST. (Fixes Extract link address #50)
• Clickable Visualizer Links: The built-in visualizer now renders external links as clickable <a> tags.

🛠️ Bug Fixes & Refinements

• Word List Preservation: Fixed issues where numbered elements and indentation levels were lost in .docx parsing. (Fixes Numbered elements aren't preserved as they show up in .docx files #29)
• Robust PDF Parsing: Added graceful error handling for corrupt PDF files and bad XRef entries, preventing parser crashes. (Fixes UnknownErrorException bad XRef entry #44)
• Formatting Parity: Expanded support for bold, italic, underline, colors, and fonts across all parsers (Docx, Pptx, Xlsx, Odp, Odt, Ods, Pdf, Rtf).
• Strict Typing: Full TypeScript rewrite providing comprehensive interfaces for the entire AST structure.

🎨 Interactive AST Visualizer (v6.0.1 Fix)

The Live Visualizer has been revamped and fixed for stable deployment:

• Color-Coded Sections: Blue for Pages, Green for Sheets, and Orange for Slides.
• Premium UI: New card-based layout with interactive previews and deep-linked metadata.
• Deployment: Migrated to the /docs folder for standard GitHub Pages hosting at the repository's root. (Fixed in v6.0.1)

⚠️ Breaking Changes

• The library now returns an OfficeParserAST object instead of a raw string.
• To get the old behavior (plain text), call ast.toText() on the returned object.

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This discussion was created from the release v6.0.1 - 02.01.2026.