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A single parse can be read several ways. The readable and interchange renderings come from the result endpoint, where you pass a format; the strongly-typed structured result has its own endpoint and method. The underlying parse is generated once and is the same each time; how you fetch it decides how the content is shaped for you. This guide matches each option to the job it suits.

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Choose by what you do next

Markdown

Feeding a language model, or showing the document to a person.

Structured

Reading elements, tables, chart data, or positions in your own code.

Annotated

Needing the text together with where it sits on the page.

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Markdown: text for people and models

Reach for Markdown when the consumer of the output reads prose. It renders headings as headings, lists as lists, and tables as Markdown grids, which is the shape a language model handles most reliably and a person reads most easily. Use it for retrieval-augmented generation, for summaries, and for any view a human will look at. The result endpoint returns Markdown as a string.

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Structured: typed elements for your code

Choose the structured result when your program acts on the content rather than displaying it. It comes back as pages of typed elements, each carrying a label, its text, a bbox, a reading_order, and a confidence score, with tables exposing their cells by row and column and charts carrying their digitized data. This is the result to read when you route content by label, pull values out of tables, or read a chart’s series.
The full field list is in the output schema.

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Annotated: Markdown with position

Use annotated output when you want readable text and still need to know where each piece came from. It is Markdown with bounding-box provenance comments attached to the content, so you can render the text and, when needed, trace a passage back to its region on the page.
If you need both a readable view and full structured data, fetch each in turn. One parse serves every rendering, so a second fetch does not re-run the work.

Output schema

Every field in the structured result.

The parsed document

The element model that every rendering expresses.