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name: layout-objects description: "Routes LayoutParser coordinate primitives, layout containers, shape operations, and layout-analysis helpers." metadata: disco-role: operating disable-model-invocation: true license: Apache 2.0

Layout Objects

Use this sub-skill for geometry-heavy LayoutParser tasks: coordinate conversion, padding, containment, serialization, sorting, and lightweight line or category grouping.

What belongs here

• Interval, Rectangle, Quadrilateral, TextBlock, and Layout
• relative/absolute coordinate transforms
• pad, shift, scale, crop_image
• union, intersect, is_in, condition_on, relative_to
• to_dict, from_dict, to_dataframe, get_homogeneous_blocks
• generalized_connected_component_analysis_1d
• simple_line_detection
• group_textblocks_based_on_category

What does not belong here

• JSON/CSV/PDF loading and export: use layout-io
• draw_box / draw_text: use visualization
• OCR response parsing: use ocr
• lp:// model catalogs or model inference: use layout-models

Read these files

• references/guide.md for the class, operation overview, and troubleshooting notes
• ../layout-io/SKILL.md when the task starts with files or PDFs
• ../visualization/SKILL.md when the task ends with rendering

Fast path

1. Identify the shape type on each block.
2. Use the most specific conversion first (Interval ↔ Rectangle ↔ Quadrilateral).
3. Use Layout batch methods for page-wide transforms.
4. Keep TextBlock wrappers when the block also carries text or ids.
5. Only approximate quadrilateral shape operations with strict=False when a bounding-box approximation is acceptable.

Common user requests

• "Filter the left column"
• "Convert boxes to rectangles"
• "Union the regions"
• "Check whether a token is inside a page block"
• "Sort blocks by reading order"
• "Group the text blocks by line or category"
• "Round-trip a layout to dict or dataframe"

Minimal smoke

Use the bundled root smoke script when you only need to confirm the geometry layer and serialization basics:

python ../../scripts/smoke_layoutparser_core.py

Failure clues

• InvalidShapeError: the chosen union/intersection is geometrically invalid.
• NotSupportedShapeError: the operation would create a polygonal result that LayoutParser cannot represent directly.
• ValueError from Layout(...): the input is not an iterable of blocks or is already a Layout wrapper.
• ValueError from TextBlock.to_interval(): the axis is missing.

Output discipline

When answering, give the exact class names and coordinate assumptions that the future agent should use. If a block should be re-encoded as another shape, state the destination shape explicitly so the user can follow the conversion.