  Inscriptis provides a library, command line client and Web service for
converting HTML to plain text. Its development has been triggered by the need
to obtain accurate text representations for knowledge extraction tasks that
preserve the spatial alignment of text without drawing upon heavyweight,
browser-based solutions such as Selenium. In contrast to related software
packages, Inscriptis (i) provides a layout-aware conversion of HTML that more
closely resembles the rendering obtained from standard Web browsers; and (ii)
supports annotation rules, i.e., user-provided mappings that allow for
annotating the extracted text based on structural and semantic information
encoded in HTML tags and attributes. These unique features ensure that
downstream knowledge extraction components can operate on accurate text
representations, and may even use information on the semantics and structure of
the original HTML document.
