Issue resolved by this Pull Request:
Part of docling-project/docling-serve#646

Hi maintainers, the PR #3633 and #3688 have added inference of section-header levels from PDF bookmarks, outline numbering and font style, configurable via PdfPipelineOptions.heading_hierarchy_options and off by default. Those options were not reachable from the service API, so every heading returned by docling-serve stayed at level=1 and the document hierarchy came back flat.

Since docling-project/docling-serve#575 moved the service request models into docling core, the API options model lives here while the pipeline mapping lives in docling-jobkit. Exposing this therefore takes three coordinated PRs:

1. this PR i add the option to ConvertDocumentsOptions
2. feat(API): expose PDF heading-level inference in the service API docling-jobkit#212 i map it onto PdfPipelineOptions and retain parsed pages for the style signal
3. feat(API): expose PDF heading-level inference in the service API docling-serve#662 make changes in UI toggle and regenerated API docs

This PR adds heading_hierarchy_options to ConvertDocumentsOptions, typed as the existing HeadingHierarchyOptions so the API mirrors PdfPipelineOptions.heading_hierarchy_options field-for-field rather than introducing a parallel flat schema. That keeps one place to learn and avoids drift as the pipeline options evolve, and it means the nested knobs (use_bookmarks, use_numbering, use_style, numbering_schemes, max_level, bookmark_match_threshold) come along for free, including their ge/le bounds and their descriptions in generated API docs.

The nested model also works over multipart/form-data, where docling-serve's FormDepends accepts nested models as JSON strings, verified in docling-project/docling-serve#662.

Verification

Schema generation, defaults and validation:

• ConvertDocumentsOptions().heading_hierarchy_options.enabled is False
• model_json_schema() resolves the $ref and serializes both examples
• nested values parse ({"enabled": true, "max_level": 4}), unset keys keep their model defaults
• out-of-range values are rejected (max_level: 0 raises)

End-to-end through docling-serve's /v1/convert/file, converting 2408.09869v5.pdf with all three PRs applied:

3.1 PDF backends → level 2, Layout Analysis Model → level 3, Abstract → level 2. 12 of 20 headings corrected, and the default path is unchanged.

Checklist:

• Documentation has been updated, if necessary.
• Examples have been added, if necessary.
• Tests have been added, if necessary.