layout

Definition

The spatial arrangement of text, figures, and tables on a page or screen. For document understanding this is not decoration: column order, headings, and table borders carry meaning that a flat character stream loses, so models are commonly given bounding-box coordinates alongside the text. Same word as in graphic design, but here layout is an input signal to be parsed rather than something a human composes.

Explainers using this term

• Document AI and OCR Today — How an LLM Ends Up Reading Your InvoicesLayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding