Flexiconv

Flexiconv is a Python library, CLI, and desktop GUI for converting between many corpus and document formats via a shared, token-centric pivot representation and a TEITOK-style TEI XML target.

Supported input families include:

• TEI / TEITOK (teitok, tei)
• Rich text / documents (rtf, docx, pdf, odt, html, md, txt, epub)
• Spoken corpora / oral transcription (eaf, textgrid, exb, trs, chat, srt, doreco)
• OCR / page layout (hocr, pagexml, alto)
• Treebanks and corpora / stand-off annotation (conllu, tcf, vert, tmx, tbt, folia, brat, webanno)

All conversions go via:

• A pivot model in flexiconv.core (layers, anchors, nodes, spans) that can represent crossing annotations.
• A TEITOK-style TEI representation (flexiconv.io.teitok_xml) that mirrors the conventions of teitok-tools and acts as a TEI/XML view of the pivot.

The focus is on semantic and structural fidelity (sections, paragraphs, lists, tables, tokens, annotations), not on pixel-perfect reproduction of the original layout. Round-tripping formats (e.g. DOCX → TEI → DOCX or PDF → TEI → HTML) will typically preserve structure and content, but not exact visual identity; final page layout is left to tools like Word, browsers, or typesetters.

Install

Install from GitHub (requires Git):

pip install 'git+https://github.com/ufal/flexiconv'

To install optional extras (RTF, DOCX, ODT, Markdown, PDF support):

pip install 'git+https://github.com/ufal/flexiconv#egg=flexiconv[rtf,docx,odt,md,pdf]'

For development, use an editable install from a clone:

git clone https://github.com/ufal/flexiconv
cd flexiconv
pip install -e .

Quick start

Once installed:

# Single-file conversion (format auto-detected where possible)
flexiconv input.ext output.xml

# Explicit formats
flexiconv -f vert -t teitok examples/vert/desam-v20.vert

# Batch-convert a folder (recursively)
flexiconv -R path/to/input_dir path/to/output_dir -t teitok

# Inspect formats
flexiconv info formats
flexiconv info format vert

Desktop app (flexiConv)

A standalone desktop GUI is available for conversion and (planned) deduplication — no Python install required. Download the installer for your platform from the apps/ folder (or from Releases when published). See apps/README.md for supported platforms and how to build the apps from source.

Documentation

• Pivot model and mapping design: see examples/md/FORMATS_AND_MAPPINGS.md; the pivot is implemented in flexiconv.core.model and reflected in the format pages under wiki/.
• Deduplication: exact and near-identical duplicate detection, SQLite index, incremental and cross-format — see wiki/Deduplication.md.
• User-oriented docs and format pages: see the wiki/ folder; wiki/README.md is the index. Each supported format has a short page with:
  • Origin and typical use
  • A minimal example
  • How Flexiconv maps it to TEITOK / the pivot model.