v6.1.0

[harshankur]

v6.1.0 - 14.04.2026

Changes: v6.0.7..v6.1.0

This release marks a major milestone in the technical maturity of officeParser, moving from a monolithic parser to a robust, resource-aware infrastructure. v6.1.0 focuses on stability, performance, and developer experience without breaking core backward compatibility.

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🔥 Major Highlights

🧠 Smart OCR Worker Pool

We’ve completely rewritten the OCR engine to handle internal resource management intelligently.

• Lazy Initialization: OCR workers and tesseract.js are now lazy-loaded. Simply require or import the library at the top-level no longer spawns any background processes, resolving the long-standing "process leak" issue.
• Worker Pooling: Workers are now pooled and reused across parallel parsing requests, providing up to 3x faster processing for documents with multiple images.
• Auto-Termination: A new idle-timer automatically cleans up worker processes after 10 seconds of inactivity (configurable via ocrConfig.autoTerminateTimeout).
• Manual Control: Exported a new terminateOcr() function for snappy CLI script exits.

📦 Modern Infrastructure Migration

• Fflate Integration: Replaced legacy yauzl and concat-stream with fflate. This allows for zero-memory-buffer zip extraction, significantly improving performance on massive spreadsheets and low-memory environments like Edge Functions.
• Native ESM Support: v6.1.0 now ships with native .mjs support and verified Node16 module resolution.
• PDF.js v5: Upgraded the internal PDF engine to the latest stable release (v5.6.205) with improved text-layer coordinate alignment.

🏷️ Custom Property Extraction

You can now extract user-defined custom metadata (e.g., custom tags, proprietary fields) across almost all formats:

• OOXML: Standard custom document properties (docProps/custom.xml).
• ODF: User-defined fields in OpenOffice/LibreOffice metadata.
• PDF: Custom key-value pairs from the PDF Info dictionary.
• Available in ast.metadata.customProperties.

📄 Documentation & Branding Overhaul

• Premium SPA Docs: A completely redesigned live documentation site with persistent fragments.
• Interactive Visualizer: Test any file in-browser to see the hierarchical AST and real-time preview.
• Troubleshooting Guide: A new, comprehensive debugging guide covering everything from process hangs to PDF worker resolution.
• Metric Standardization: Standardized all download metrics to 260k+ weekly installs with dynamic Shields.io badges and live verification links via npm-stat.com.

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🛠️ API & Configuration Changes

New Configuration Options (OfficeParserConfig)

• ocrConfig: New object for fine-grained OCR control.
• ocrConfig.autoTerminateTimeout: Duration (ms) to keep workers alive before cleanup.
• ocrConfig.workerPath, ocrConfig.corePath, ocrConfig.langPath: Full support for air-gapped/offline local Tesseract hosting.

Deprecations

• ocrLanguage: This string property is now deprecated. Use ocrConfig.language instead. (Note: Existing code using ocrLanguage will continue to work perfectly in v6.1.0).

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🐛 Bug Fixes & Refinements

• PDF: Fixed hierarchical alignment where links sometimes drifted from their corresponding text nodes.
• ODT/RTF: Improved list parsing to accurately reflect nested indentation levels in the AST.
• CLI: The command-line interface now automatically calls terminateOcr() for a faster return to the prompt.
• Sponsorship: Integrated funding.json and .well-known manifest support for community sustainability.

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⚠️ Migration Note for v6.0.7 Users

While this is a non-breaking release for the public API, Node.js script authors using OCR may notice their process stays alive for 10 seconds after finishing due to the new worker pool. We recommend adding await terminateOcr() at the end of your scripts for an immediate exit.

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❤️ Contributors

A huge shoutout to @carlosb1504 for their contributions to:

• Replacing yauzl with fflate for improved performance and browser compatibility.
• Implementing the core custom property extraction logic across OOXML and ODF formats.

Full Changelog: v6.0.7...v6.1.0

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This discussion was created from the release v6.1.0.