Datasheet Parser

What does Datasheet Parser do?

Datasheet Parser turns a component datasheet PDF into normalized spec JSON. You supply the file, either by upload or by a direct http(s) link such as the manufacturer's own PDF. The Actor reads absolute-maximum and electrical tables, pinouts, and ordering rows, and every value cites the file and page it came from.

It does not search the web, and it does not open datasheet aggregator sites (AllDataSheet, Datasheet4U, and the rest of the block list). An HTML catalog page is rejected instead of being crawled for more links.

Full page text is off by default. The dataset gets structured fields and a short provenance snippet. Turn on includePageText only when you have the right to store the datasheet prose.

Why use Datasheet Parser?

Hardware engineers, component buyers, and BOM or PLM teams keep retyping the same limits out of PDFs. The public request shows up in places like r/AskElectronics and Hacker News. Store Actors that parse datasheets today are single-vendor (for example a Rockwell-only parser).

This Actor is vendor-agnostic:

• Digital PDFs are read with PyMuPDF table finding, with a text-layout fallback when the page has no ruling lines.
• Scanned pages go through Tesseract OCR. English traineddata is in the image.
• Original numbers and units are kept, and an SI normalizedValue is added (volts, amperes, ohms, farads, hertz, watts, seconds, and kelvin for °C).
• A bad file becomes an error item and is not charged. The rest of the run continues. If every input fails, the run itself fails.
• Scheduling, the dataset API, and key-value storage come from the Apify platform. There is no browser. Apify Proxy is not used.

What data can it extract?

Field	What it is
identity	Manufacturer, part numbers and ordering codes, series, description, packages, RoHS, REACH, revision, revision date. Each value has a provenance object.
specifications	Rows of parameter, symbol, conditions, min, typ, max, unit, SI normalizedValue, footnoteRefs, unitMissing when a number has no unit, relativeLimits when a limit is a rail offset rather than an absolute number, and provenance.
pinout	Pin number, name, and function when a pin table is present.
ordering	Ordering code, package, packing, RoHS.
operatingTemperature / supplyVoltage	Ranges from a labeled sentence, or from a matching spec row.
status	ok, partial, or error, plus errors and warnings.
category	auto guess (MOSFET, diode, regulator, capacitor, resistor, connector, sensor, MCU, IC, other) or your hint.

How to parse a datasheet

1. Open the Actor and set the run memory to 512 MB (the recommended size; the Actor allows 512–4096 MB) and the timeout to 300 seconds.
2. Add datasheets in one of two ways. Paste a direct PDF URL into Datasheet URLs, or use Datasheet files to upload a PDF, a PNG/JPEG scan, or a ZIP of those. A bare key such as nw3401n.pdf is also accepted when that record already exists in the run's default key-value store. The Console file picker stores the upload and passes its record URL.
3. Leave Include full page text off unless you need the prose. Leave the LLM switch off unless you want empty identity fields filled with your own API key.
4. Run the Actor and open the dataset. Use the Overview, Specifications, Pinout, and Ordering views, or download JSON, CSV, or Excel.

An input that matches the synthetic fixture is in examples/input.json. The output below is a real parse of that fixture, not a mock. The full item is examples/output.json.

How much does a datasheet parse cost?

The published pay-per-event prices are $0.02 per parsed file and $0.002 per OCR page. A download or parse that fails is not charged the per-file event, and its OCR pages are not charged either. The code records event names only after a file produced identity or table data. Dollar amounts live in the Apify Console, not in the request.

Event	When it is charged	Price
datasheet-parsed	Once per file whose status is ok or partial and that produced identity or table data. This is the primary event.	$0.02
page-ocr	Once per page that Tesseract actually read, and only on a file that was charged as datasheet-parsed.	$0.002

Actor.push_data is called without a charge event. Do not leave the synthetic apify-default-dataset-item event enabled, or every dataset row is billed again on top of datasheet-parsed. Remove that event in the Console monetization settings.

Do not charge apify-actor-start from code. If you keep that synthetic event, Apify covers the first 5 seconds of compute (once, up to and including 1 GB). A single digital datasheet finishes inside that window. A batch of scanned pages does not, which is why page-ocr exists.

Error files (unsupported type, blocked host, HTTP 403, timeout, empty archive) are pushed so you can see what failed. They are not charged.

Measured cost is in Runtime and memory. Price each event at at least 3× the compute it causes. You receive 80% of event revenue, so a list price of about 3.75× compute is what leaves you 3× compute after Apify's share.

Input

See the Input tab for every field. The limits default to 10 files, 120 pages, and 20 MB per file. auto category includes op-amp as well as diode, MOSFET, regulator, and the other families in the list.

datasheetUrls accepts a URL string or { "url": "https://..." }. Custom headers and cookies are ignored. Only http and https are fetched, one file per URL, over HTTP/1.1, with a short redirect cap. DNS, TCP connect, TLS, redirects, the body, and retries share one 20 second wall-clock deadline. The socket is closed when that deadline passes, including when the peer trickles bytes. Each resolved address gets at most 5 seconds to connect and finish TLS, so a blackholed address cannot stack its own timeout on top of the next one, and the total of every address, redirect, and retry still stays inside 20 seconds. HTTP 401, 403, and 451, and a connection reset, fail immediately and are not retried. A 403 says the site blocks cloud and datacenter IPs and that you should upload the PDF. Private, loopback, and link-local addresses are rejected, including after DNS. Aggregator hosts are rejected before the request is sent.

The platform run timer also includes container startup and shutdown. A download that uses the full 20 seconds often shows a run of about 28–30 seconds. That extra time is outside the download deadline.

Some manufacturer sites block cloud and datacenter IP addresses. st.com often times out. onsemi.com often answers HTTP 403. For those hosts the Actor logs an upload hint before it starts the download. Upload the PDF with Datasheet files instead of pasting the URL. The failed download is an error item and is not charged. OUTPUT and SUMMARY list each failure with a category and the domain: blocked (HTTP 401, 403, 451, a connection reset, or the cloud-IP block note), timeout, invalid_input, parse_error, or other. The same line is the run status message. It names the domain and the file name, not the full URL or the query string.

Each PDF record includes pagesProcessed and pagesTotal. The default of 120 pages is enough for the 68-page TI LM358 and the 55-page ST L78 at the recommended 512 MB (measured peak RSS on those files is about 130 MB, and reading 120 text-layer pages stays well under that memory cap and the 300 second run timeout). If the file is longer than maxPages, status is partial, and warnings includes Truncated PDF: processed N of M pages (pagesProcessed=N, pagesTotal=M). Raise maxPages (maximum 200) to read the rest. A fully scanned file is slower because OCR runs per page; lower maxPages for those.

Proxy (proxyConfiguration) is off by default. Apify Proxy is not supported and is ignored with a warning; upload the PDF when a site blocks the download. Advanced users can pass their own proxy in Custom proxy URLs. The Actor never enables a proxy on its own.

componentCategoryHint = auto scores the first pages. Any other allowed value is stored as category, and the guess is still returned as detectedCategory.

normalizeUnits (default on) writes normalizedValue in SI and leaves min / typ / max / unit as printed.

A limit printed as an offset from a rail, such as VS – 1.5 V or (V+) – 1.5, is not stored as the absolute number 1.5. min, typ, and max stay null for that column. relativeLimits holds the raw text, the rail name, and the signed offset:

"relativeLimits": [
  { "role": "min", "text": "VS – 1.5", "reference": "VS", "offset": -1.5 }
]

role is the column the expression sits in (min, typ, or max). offset is volts in the row's unit, negative when the rail is reduced. (V–) with no number is { "reference": "V-", "offset": 0 }.

useLlm is off by default. When you enable it and pass llmApiKey, the Actor sends only the empty manufacturer, series, and description slots plus the part numbers it already extracted. It does not upload the datasheet. A missing key is a warning, not a failed run. Extracted values are never overwritten.

Output

You can download the dataset as JSON, CSV, Excel, or HTML. One item per file:

{
  "sourceName": "nw3401n.pdf",
  "status": "ok",
  "category": "MOSFET",
  "partNumber": "NW3401N",
  "identity": {
    "manufacturer": {
      "value": "Northwind Semiconductor",
      "provenance": { "file": "nw3401n.pdf", "page": 1, "snippet": "Manufacturer: Northwind Semiconductor" }
    },
    "revision": { "value": "C", "provenance": { "file": "nw3401n.pdf", "page": 1, "snippet": "Revision: C" } }
  },
  "specifications": [
    {
      "table": "absolute_maximum_ratings",
      "parameter": "Drain-source voltage",
      "symbol": "VDS",
      "conditions": null,
      "min": null,
      "typ": null,
      "max": 60,
      "unit": "V",
      "normalizedValue": { "min": null, "typ": null, "max": 60, "siUnit": "V" },
      "page": 1,
      "provenance": { "file": "nw3401n.pdf", "page": 1, "snippet": "Drain-source voltage VDS 60 V" }
    },
    {
      "table": "electrical_characteristics",
      "parameter": "Drain-source on resistance",
      "symbol": "RDS(on)",
      "conditions": "VGS = 10 V, ID = 15 A",
      "min": null,
      "typ": 35,
      "max": 44,
      "unit": "mohm",
      "normalizedValue": { "min": null, "typ": 0.035, "max": 0.044, "siUnit": "ohm" },
      "page": 2,
      "provenance": { "file": "nw3401n.pdf", "page": 2, "snippet": "Drain-source on resistance RDS(on) VGS = 10 V, ID = 15 A 35 44 mohm" }
    }
  ],
  "pinout": [
    { "pin": "1", "name": "G", "function": "Gate", "page": 2, "provenance": { "file": "nw3401n.pdf", "page": 2, "snippet": "1 G Gate" } }
  ],
  "operatingTemperature": {
    "min": -55,
    "max": 175,
    "unit": "degC",
    "normalizedValue": { "min": 218.15, "max": 448.15, "siUnit": "K" }
  }
}

That JSON is abbreviated. examples/output.json is the full item from the 10-page synthetic fixture (12 spec rows, 3 pins, 2 ordering codes). Snippets are capped at 180 characters and contact details in a snippet are redacted.

Runtime and memory

Measured with scripts/measure_cost.py on the synthetic fixtures (Python 3.12, PyMuPDF 1.26, Tesseract 5.3). This is parse time inside one process. It does not include pulling the image or Apify container startup.

Case	Time	Peak RSS	Compute at 512 MB and $0.20 / GB-hour	3× that compute
10-page synthetic digital datasheet	0.11 s	91 MB	$0.0000031	$0.0000094
Vishay 1N4001, 5 pages	1.3 s	97 MB	$0.000036	$0.00011
TI LM358, 68 pages	7.7 s	128 MB	$0.00021	$0.00064
ST L78, 55 pages	4.3 s	124 MB	$0.00012	$0.00036

These are in-process times on a fast CPU. Apify bills allocated memory for the whole run, including startup, so a 512 MB run costs about half of a 1024 MB run for the same wall time. Peak RSS stays near 130 MB, so 512 MB is enough. A 1024 MB run does not make extraction faster. Use 300 seconds so a few long datasheets, or a scanned file that really needs OCR, can finish. Blank pages are not sent to Tesseract. Table finding after the first pages runs only on pages that look like a ratings, pin, or ordering table.

Apify bills the allocated memory for the whole run, not the RSS. 512 MB is about 4× the measured peak and is the recommended run size (minMemoryMbytes is 512, maxMemoryMbytes is 4096). The $0.20 figure is the Starter plan compute-unit price; Scale is $0.16, so Starter is the conservative cost. With apify-actor-start enabled, the first 5 seconds at or below 1 GB are not billed as compute, so a one-file digital run is dominated by the start event ($0.00005 at the platform default) rather than by parse time. Use the per-page OCR number when a run will OCR more than a handful of pages.

Limitations

• Some manufacturer sites block requests that come from a cloud or datacenter IP. st.com often times out (timeout). onsemi.com often returns HTTP 403 (blocked). The same link can work from a home network. Upload that PDF with the file input. A failed download is an error item, it is not charged, and the run summary names the category and the domain. Apify Proxy is not supported; your own proxy URL is optional.
• A run whose every input fails, or whose input is empty, ends as FAILED. The same summary is the status message and the key-value records OUTPUT and SUMMARY. A run that parsed at least one file stays SUCCEEDED and still lists the failures. One timed-out URL is FAILED because nothing was parsed; the download itself stopped at 20 seconds.
• maxPages defaults to 120. A longer PDF is truncated: pagesProcessed is how many pages were read, pagesTotal is how many the file contains, and the warning states both. pageCount remains the number of pages read.
• Extraction is deterministic and rule-based. Curves, graphs, mechanical drawings, and tables whose headers are not words like Parameter, Symbol, Min, Typ, Max, or Unit are missed or only partly read.
• A two-row header is merged when the second row is Min / Typ / Max. Footnotes such as (1) are appended to the conditions text when that note is on the same page.
• Subscripts depend on the text layer. RDS(on) survives when the PDF encodes it that way.
• OCR is the vendored docpipe path (Tesseract via pytesseract, English traineddata in the image). A clean scan of large text works. A photograph of a ruled table often garbles the grid even when the title block is readable. Prefer the manufacturer's text-layer PDF. Language codes must be three letters (eng, eng+deu).
• Other Tesseract languages are accepted only when that traineddata is installed. A missing language falls back to English.
• The optional LLM never replaces a value the rules already found, and it is not a check on electrical correctness.
• These JSON limits are not a substitute for the datasheet when you are choosing a part for a design.

Legal

You may only process files you supply: an upload, a key-value record you already stored, or a direct URL you are allowed to fetch. Do not point the Actor at aggregator or mirror sites. The block list is there as a guard, not as a promise that every mirror is named.

Datasheet text and drawings are copyrighted by the manufacturer. The default output is the structured values plus a short snippet so you can find the row again. includePageText stores full page text and is off unless you turn it on. You are responsible for having the right to make and keep that copy.

Snippets redact email addresses and phone-like numbers. A datasheet can still contain names or other personal data. Do not publish a dataset that you are not allowed to share.

The Actor does not log in to any site and does not bypass access controls.

Pricing events

Event name constants live in src/settings.py:

• datasheet-parsed — primary event, one per successfully parsed file (ok or partial with extracted data). $0.02.
• page-ocr — one per OCR'd page on a file that was charged. $0.002. A failed file is not charged for either event.

Both are charged with Actor.charge after the file has been parsed, using an idempotency key of the file SHA-256 (and the page index for OCR). push_data does not pass charged_event_name.

Console checklist before you publish:

1. Keep pay-per-event pricing with datasheet-parsed at $0.02 and page-ocr at $0.002. Those prices are far above the measured compute for a digital datasheet. Do not also charge a failed file.
2. Remove apify-default-dataset-item so dataset rows are not billed a second time.
3. Keep apify-actor-start at the platform default if you want the free first 5 seconds. Do not also add a custom start event.

docpipe

docpipe/ is the document pipeline from apify-tender-attachment-parser at commit 8fabfe24f8845b6ae54d2d97568c3e1aa60dea88. The only local change is in docpipe/pdf.py: a page with no image and almost no text is not sent to Tesseract. See docpipe/VENDORED_FROM. Datasheet tables, part-number choice, aggregator host checks, and snippets live in src/.

scripts/sync_docpipe.sh replaces the tree from GitHub, from --path, or from --tar (pass --commit for a tarball). A sync drops local edits.

中文摘要

Datasheet Parser 把你自己提供的电子元器件数据手册 PDF 解析成结构化规格 JSON，供硬件工程师、器件采购和 BOM/PLM 使用。输入只能是上传的文件，或制造商等站点上的直接 PDF 链接。不会抓取 AllDataSheet、Datasheet4U 等数据手册汇总站，也不会登录或绕过访问限制。

默认不输出整页原文（数据手册受版权保护），只输出参数、数值，以及不超过约 180 字的出处（文件名 + 页码）。需要全文时，必须显式打开 includePageText。扫描页用 Tesseract OCR。单位可换算到 SI，原始数值仍保留。单个文件失败不会中断整个运行。

计费事件：每成功解析一份文件收取 datasheet-parsed（$0.02），每 OCR 一页收取 page-ocr（$0.002）。下载或解析失败的文件不收费。请关闭合成事件 apify-default-dataset-item，否则每条数据集记录会被再计一次费。建议运行内存 512 MB，超时 300 秒。默认最多读 120 页；超出时记录里会有 pagesProcessed、pagesTotal 和截断警告。单次下载（含连接、TLS、重定向和重试）最多约 20 秒；平台运行时间还包含容器启动和结束，所以一次用满下载时限的运行常显示约 28–30 秒。st.com、onsemi.com 等会拦截云 IP，运行一开始就会提示改上传 PDF。不支持 Apify Proxy；可以自备代理 URL。若至少有一份文件解析成功，运行状态为 SUCCEEDED，失败项仍会列出。若全部失败或输入为空，状态为 FAILED。SUMMARY 和状态消息里的失败项带有类别（blocked、timeout、invalid_input、parse_error、other）和域名，不含完整 URL 或查询串。