Azure Content Understanding — Layout Analyzer

Extract structured content from documents using Azure's prebuilt-layout analyzer. Outputs Markdown and structured JSON with text, tables, figures, and document hierarchy.

Setup

Set environment variables:

export AZURE_CU_ENDPOINT="https://YOUR_RESOURCE.services.ai.azure.com/"
export AZURE_CU_API_KEY="YOUR_KEY_HERE"

Optional: set API version (defaults to 2025-05-01-preview):

export AZURE_CU_API_VERSION="2025-11-01"

Quick Usage

Analyze a URL and print Markdown

node scripts/analyze.mjs --url "https://example.com/document.pdf"

Analyze a local file (pipe via stdin)

cat invoice.pdf | node scripts/analyze.mjs --stdin --markdown output.md --output result.json

Save both Markdown and full JSON

node scripts/analyze.mjs --url "https://example.com/report.pdf" \
  --markdown report.md \
  --output report.json

Direct API Call

When the script isn't available, use curl:

# Submit analysis (preview API)
curl -s -X POST "$AZURE_CU_ENDPOINT/contentunderstanding/analyzers/prebuilt-layout:analyze?api-version=2025-05-01-preview" \
  -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key: $AZURE_CU_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com/doc.pdf"}'

# Response includes Operation-Location header — poll that URL for results

For GA API (2025-11-01), the body format changes:

{"inputs": [{"url": "https://example.com/doc.pdf"}]}

Output

Markdown

The analyzer produces GitHub Flavored Markdown preserving:

• Headings (h1–h6)
• Tables (as HTML \x3Ctable> blocks)
• Selection marks (☒ checked, ☐ unchecked)
• Figures (with references)
• Paragraphs with reading order

Structured JSON

The full result includes detailed per-element data:

• pages — dimensions, word/line counts per page
• paragraphs — text blocks with bounding regions and semantic roles
• tables — cells with row/column spans
• figures — detected images/charts with bounding regions
• sections — hierarchical document structure

Supported Formats

PDF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, HEIF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, HTML

Best Practices

• Async operation — the API returns 202; poll Operation-Location for results
• Poll interval — 3 seconds is reasonable; results typically arrive in 5–60 seconds
• Large documents — up to 2,000 pages supported; processing time scales linearly
• File upload — use Content-Type: application/octet-stream with binary body
• Tables — rendered as HTML in markdown for complex layouts (merged cells, etc.)

API Reference

See references/api.md for full request/response details.