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Marker: Convert PDF to Markdown quickly with high accuracy

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Re: Marker: Convert PDF to Markdown quickly with high accuracy

#4
Great work! I am a bit confused with the comparison with nougat throughout the repo. Nougat was specifically trained for academic documents, and I don't think anyone ever claimed Nougat was the best OCR model out there. That's kinda clear in your benchmark too where you mention that nougat has higher accuracy on arxiv documents. You also mention that marker will convert fewer equations when compared to nougat, and yet compare with nougat in terms of speed? (again, only complaining because it's a model designed for academic documents).

For anyone trying to do OCR on any pdf with math in it, definitely do try nougat. It's very easy to install (just a python package), and extracts the math, text, tables and beyond (in a .mmd file) with a single command line command. It also runs reasonably fast for personal uses - it takes about 30 seconds to convert a 6 page document using CPU only on my 4 year old i5 laptop.

Re: Marker: Convert PDF to Markdown quickly with high accuracy

#8
This looks amazing, I'll have to play around with this over the weekend.

I regularly hand transcribe RPG PDFs scans from dubious sources that have not always been run through OCR to have selectable text. If it has, it wasn't always done very well.

It's literally faster to type it all myself than fix all the errors from copy-pasting (or after using OCR to turn it into text).

Even if the file was an official PDF the formatting would often get screwed up with lots of double or triple spaces and even tabs included between words.

This would save so much time if I can get it to work. Thanks for sharing!

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