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Dreep features a built-in proprietary Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, allowing you to instantly extract plain text from uploaded images (like receipts) and documents (like PDFs). This extraction integrates directly with Dreep’s standard Asset Delivery pipeline, which means that any text you extract automatically benefits from:
  • Signed URLs (for private folder access)
  • Edge Caching (extracted text is cached forever in your connected storage)

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How to extract text

Text extraction happens on-the-fly when you fetch an asset. To extract text from an uploaded image or PDF, simply fetch the file using the .txt extension or the format=txt query parameter. When you append .txt to the end of any valid Dreep fetch URL, the system will automatically run OCR against the source file and return raw text/plain.

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Using the Query Parameter

If you prefer using standard extensions for the URL, you can pass ?format=txt.

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Supported Formats

Dreep’s OCR engine currently supports extracting text from:
  • Images: .jpg, .jpeg, .png
  • Documents: .pdf (Note: synchronous extraction supports single-page PDFs or the first page of multi-page PDFs).

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Caching and Billing

The OCR engine is incredibly powerful, but running machine learning models on every request is slow and expensive. To solve this, Dreep caches the result of every successful text extraction directly into your project’s storage bucket (under a derived key).
  • The first request to .txt takes roughly 1-2 seconds as the engine processes the document.
  • All subsequent requests take less than ~50ms, as Dreep streams the plain text file straight out of storage.
Billing implications: You are only billed for the first extraction of a given document. This deducts 1 from your plan’s monthly OCR Pages allowance. Fetching the cached result is free and only incurs standard bandwidth costs.

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Drawing Bounding Boxes in your UI

If you need to highlight extracted text on the screen (for example, allowing a user to click on specific lines or words in a document), you’ll need the exact coordinates of where that text was found. Since the standard fetch API (.txt) only returns plain text, you should use the Upload & Extract Text API endpoint and set includeBlocks=true. This will return an array of blocks, each containing a Geometry.BoundingBox with Top, Left, Width, and Height values. Important: These values are returned as ratios (between 0.0 and 1.0) relative to the overall image size, rather than absolute pixel values. This makes it trivial to draw bounding boxes on the frontend regardless of how the image is scaled in your UI! To convert them to screen pixels, simply multiply by your DOM element’s rendered width and height: