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Marker: Convert PDF to Markdown quickly with high accuracy

github.com

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

#41

Post by rereasonable »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #26

How good is tesseract for OCR nowadays? I tried using it a while back and it was nowhere near as good as the online offerings from AWS, Azure and GCP.

Last update was pretty recent, and the git mentions tesseract 5 as a dep. so it's likely moved on a bit from when you last tried it:

https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/releases

I suppose it depends on your use-case. For personal tasks like this it should be more than sufficient, and won't need user details/cc or whatever to use it.

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

#42

Post by Geee »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #26

How good is tesseract for OCR nowadays? I tried using it a while back and it was nowhere near as good as the online offerings from AWS, Azure and GCP.

I tried it quite recently and it failed on a very basic image. I also tried the iOS Vision API, which also failed. My test case was a clear photo of a book page.

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

#43

Post by miki123211 »

mannycalavera42 wrote: post #31

Let's not underestimate the impact of such tool: we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format. I'm very excited about it. Let's build a pipeline: all the pdfs -> markdown them all -> archive.org them all

This also has tons of use-cases for accessibility, getting PDF accessibility right is tons of work and even if you manage it, it's highly likely that the PDF viewers your users use don't support the necessary standards anyway.

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

#45

Post by Alex3917 »

mannycalavera42 wrote: post #31

Let's not underestimate the impact of such tool: we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format. I'm very excited about it. Let's build a pipeline: all the pdfs -> markdown them all -> archive.org them all

> we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format.

FWIW PDF is actually great for distribution. It allows you to invisibly embed all the raw data used to generate the document that the end user is seeing, in whatever format you want. So if you are generating your PDFs by using PrinceXML to render HTML, you can embed the raw JSON used to generate all of the text, graphs, charts, etc. Now most people don't actually do this of course, but that isn't the fault of the spec.

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

#46

Post by sertbdfgbnfgsd »

Question for the author: Why to markdown? It seems to me the hard part of this tool is parsing pdfs with high accuracy, not whatever you do with them. As such, I would love if this tool allowed the user to choose the output format. I know that I would use a high accuracy pdf parser to render into epub.

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

#47

Post by sertbdfgbnfgsd »

Alex3917 wrote: post #45
mannycalavera42 wrote: post #31

Let's not underestimate the impact of such tool: we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format. I'm very excited about it. Let's build a pipeline: all the pdfs -> markdown them all -> archive.org them all

> we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format. FWIW PDF is actually great for distribution. It allows you to invisibly embed all the raw data used to generate the document that the end user is seeing, in whatever format you want. So if you are generating your PDFs by using PrinceXML to render HTML, you can embed the raw JSON used to generate all of the t…

pdfs don't play well with ereaders.

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

#48

Post by Alex3917 »

sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #47
Alex3917 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format. FWIW PDF is actually great for distribution. It allows you to invisibly embed all the raw data used to generate the document that the end user is seeing, in whatever format you want. So if you are generating your PDFs by using PrinceXML to render HTML, you can embed the raw JSON used to generate all of the t…

pdfs don't play well with ereaders.

Are the standards for building accessible PDFs worse than the standards for building accessible websites, or are they just not as commonly implemented?

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

#49

Post by carschno »

sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #46

Question for the author: Why to markdown? It seems to me the hard part of this tool is parsing pdfs with high accuracy, not whatever you do with them. As such, I would love if this tool allowed the user to choose the output format. I know that I would use a high accuracy pdf parser to render into epub.

I agree, the intermediate format should be plain text that could optionally be converted to any other format. I suppose that Markdown, however, is used as intermediate format here. It is close to plain text while it can preserve simple layout information.

In practice, I would use the Markdown output and plug it into any tool that converts that into the desired final output format.

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

#50

Post by sertbdfgbnfgsd »

Alex3917 wrote: post #48
sertbdfgbnfgsd wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pdfs don't play well with ereaders.

Are the standards for building accessible PDFs worse than the standards for building accessible websites, or are they just not as commonly implemented?

I don't know anything about websites. I had ebooks in mind.
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