Parsing a page into structured text or Markdown means making a run of judgment calls:

• • Is this block of aligned text a table, or just layout?
• • Does a header that spans two rows stay two rows, or get flattened into one?
• • Is a table that continues onto the next page one table or two?
• • Does a flowchart get described, converted to Mermaid, or skipped?

Different parsers make different calls. So two parsers can capture every word on a page and still hand you outputs that mean different things. An agent works only from what the parser hands it, so if the parser groups a header wrong, the agent’s answer is wrong too. But there’s no shared definition of what a correctly parsed page looks like.

The Document Parsing Protocol (DPP) is our proposed definition: an answer key for document parsing, with the reasoning behind each hard call. Today we're publishing working draft 0.1. Its 140 rules cover text, tables, forms, charts, diagrams, and more, and each comes with example pages and the output it expects. It grew out of the rules our annotators followed when labeling pages for ParseBench, our parsing benchmark.