Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Marker: Convert PDF to Markdown quickly with high accuracy

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 101 posts

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

#91

Post by HeavyStorm »

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…

The problem of PDF is not distribution, it's consumption. It has a fixed layout that's so 1990 that makes me itch.

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

#92

Post by sumedh »

alsodumb wrote: post #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 ye…

> extracts the math, text, tables

I want to extract financial statements from pdfs which are in tables, would Nougat be suitable for that use case?

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

#93

Post by samuell »

afandian wrote: post #87
samuell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting! I tried it, but it seems to struggle with multi-column layouts (lines get intermingled). Is that something you tried?

No, only standard paragraphs. My workflow still takes manual tweaking. When I find floated figures with captions, the lines get intertwingled and need to be unintertwingled. So I'm not surprised it didn't work for you. Good luck, report back if you find what you're looking for. I'm always on the lookout for a better way.

I can report that the closest I've came before is with PDFMiner (https://pypi.org/project/pdfminer/) for Python. The benefit of this one is that it retains styling information, so that italics and the like can be retained, at least with some post-processing (I think one might need to convert certain CSS-classes to actual or tags).

The other option I have started looking into is the PDFCPU library for Go. It is a bit more low-level than PDFMiner, but one gets out very well structured info, that seem it might be possible to post-process quite well, for one's particular use case and PDF layouts: https://github.com/pdfcpu/pdfcpu

I also now tried the Marker tool in the OT, and it seems to do a reasonable job. It did intermingle some columns though, at least in some tricky cases such as when there were a round shaped image in between the two columns. One note is that Marker doesn't seem to retain styling like italics though.

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

#94

Post by nicodjimenez »

pk-protect-ai wrote: post #19
phi-go wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should mention that you are the CEO of Mathpix.

It actually doesn't matter. For my cases, I found Mathpix to be much more reliable than Nougat, for example. So, when you have hundreds of documents to convert a year and little time for manual labor on the results, paying a yearly "pro" subscription fee is worth it. However, it will really hit your pocket when you need to prepare datasets from thousands of PDFs... That's what you can't afford without a budget alloca…

Mathpix is going to lower price a lot for larger scale pdf processing, stay tuned!

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

#97

Post by da39a3ee »

vikp wrote: post #64
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 chose markdown because I wanted to preserve equations (fenced by $/$$), tables, bold/italic information, and headers. I haven't looked into epub output, but this ruled out plain text.

Why not choose an unambiguously parseable output format such as JSON, and then convert JSON to markdown/ html / etc when needed?

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

#98

Post by Ldorigo »

vikp wrote: post #62
alsodumb wrote: post #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 ye…

Author here: for my use case (converting scientific PDFs in bulk), nougat was the best solution, so I compared to it as the default. I also compare to naive text extraction further down. Nougat is a great model, and converts a lot of PDFs very well. I just wanted something faster, and more generalizable.

Reading your comment and parent's I think perhaps there is a mistake in the comparison chart on GitHub? It says nougat takes around 700 seconds per page and yours around 90. This doesn't match with parent's claim that it took him 30 seconds to run nougat on 6 pages.

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

#99

Post by creativenolo »

infecto wrote: post #68
nemacol wrote: post #61

Can someone help me understand the line >Due to the licensing of the underlying models like layoutlmv3 and nougat, this is only suitable for noncommercial usage. Does this mean it isn't suitable if I wanted to use it in a product for sale or I cannot use it for tasks at my work? I would like to try to use this at work to convert vendor documentation to include in our internal wiki.

If your work is commercial then you cannot use it. Think of it this way, is your work being used in a commercial business. Then it cannot be used. If you are using this for personal use or anything that is not part of a business, its ok.

What if your business is education and you use it in your educational output? (Serious question)

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

#100

Post by crotchfire »

kevincox wrote: post #77
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

> Let's build a pipeline I don't think that is the right approach for archiving. The preferred pipeline would be all the pdfs -> archive them all -> markdown them This way you can always re-run the conversion as bugs are fixed and improvements are made. Generally archivist prefer to save as close to the source material as possible, because every transformation from there can only lose data.

Yeah if you get down into the weeds these models are significantly corrupting the source data.

I opened the first example to a random chapter (1.4 Formal and natural languages); within the first three paragraphs it:

- Hallucinated spurious paragraph breaks

- Ignored all the boldfacing

- Hallucinated a blockquote into a new section

This is not a tool to produce something for humans to read.

Maybe it might be useful as part of some pipeline that needs to feed markdown into some other machine process. I would not waste my time reading the crud that came out of this thing.

It's a stunt.

Post reply on HN