Extractous

Extractous is a Rust-based unstructured data extraction library focused on fast local parsing of documents and other content-heavy files. Its purpose is to extract text and metadata efficiently from formats such as PDF, Word, HTML, email archives, images, and more, without depending on external APIs or separate parsing servers. The project emphasizes performance and low memory usage, and its maintainers describe it as a local-first alternative to heavier extraction stacks. For broader format support, the system combines its Rust core with ahead-of-time compiled Apache Tika shared libraries, which allows it to extend parsing coverage while still avoiding traditional server-based overhead. It also supports OCR for images and scanned documents through Tesseract, making it useful for document ingestion pipelines that include image-based or scanned inputs.