# pdf.spans.manual recipe from prodigy-pdf extracting text in hexadecimal format, but it should be plain text

**URL:** <https://support.prodi.gy/t/pdf-spans-manual-recipe-from-prodigy-pdf-extracting-text-in-hexadecimal-format-but-it-should-be-plain-text/7559>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [May 12, 2025, 5:39am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/pdf-spans-manual-recipe-from-prodigy-pdf-extracting-text-in-hexadecimal-format-but-it-should-be-plain-text/7559 "2025-05-12T05:39:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![basavarm](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/basavarm/32/4603_2.png) [@basavarm](https://support.prodi.gy/u/basavarm)\
**Post date:** [May 12, 2025, 5:39am UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/pdf-spans-manual-recipe-from-prodigy-pdf-extracting-text-in-hexadecimal-format-but-it-should-be-plain-text/7559/1 "2025-05-12T05:39:13Z")

</div>

Hello Prodigy team,

I really appreciate the great work put on building such a great tool for annotation.  
I have been using the tool for PDFs annotation lately. Please read below my issue.

I have been using prodigy-pdfs pdf.spans.manual recipe for PDF spans annotation for quite some time, its working for most of the documents untill i came accross this specific PDF formats ( Germany Company Registry document).

Steps to reproduce:  
Process the Germany Company Registry pdf document with  
below configuration

```python
docling_model_path = os.getenv("DOCLING_MODEL_PATH") #local doclng model path
pdf_pipeline_options = PdfPipelineOptions(
    do_ocr=False,
    do_table_structure=True,
    table_structure_options={"do_cell_matching": True},
    artifacts_path=docling_model_path,
)

format_options = dict(
    {
        InputFormat.PDF: PdfFormatOption(
            pipeline_cls=StandardPdfPipeline, pipeline_options=pdf_pipeline_options, backend=PyPdfiumDocumentBackend
        ),
        # TODO: can handle other format such as DocX, HTML, mails, etc
    }
)

```

Out put is spacy model with more than two lack tokens (Hexadecimal token text) because of this browser is crashing with stack overflow issue.

Expected output : Plain text output tokens.

Please note : I also tried force\_full\_page\_ocr with tessaract cli options, but no luck.

Would appreciate your help.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![magdaaniol](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex020/user_avatar/support.prodi.gy/magdaaniol/32/2787_2.png) [@magdaaniol](https://support.prodi.gy/u/magdaaniol)\
**Post date:** [May 19, 2025, 2:53pm UTC](https://support.prodi.gy/t/pdf-spans-manual-recipe-from-prodigy-pdf-extracting-text-in-hexadecimal-format-but-it-should-be-plain-text/7559/2 "2025-05-19T14:53:33Z")

</div>

Welcome to the forum @basavarm 👋 !

Thank you for all the kind words!

I'm afraid, I'm not entirely sure what your workflow is. Judging by the configuration you provided (btw. I have formatted it as code for readability) you work directly with `docling` ?  
Are the problematic tokens present in the `docling` output or do they appear in later processing (not described yet)?  
Could you also share the StackOverflow issue you referred to? Thanks!