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Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

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Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#51
post #50

I’ll join some other commenters, to add my favorite difficult pdf problem that I haven’t found a ready to use (even paid) solution for: extract key value pairs from a filled form such as this medical claims form: https://imgur.com/a/EJDi7L7 There are two levels of difficulty: the starting file could be an image (pdf or png or jpg), which is the most difficult scenario. The slightly easier one is where it’s a text-bas…

Have you tried Azure AI Document Intelligence? In theory it's exactly this...

I second this, that or have you tried GPT-4 Vision or Donut?

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are able to code or can ask someone, then you should be able to do it with some email api service (Nylas, AWS SES, etc) or headless client that gets the body of the email and convert it to pdf using wkhtmltopdf and then send it as attachment using the same service as before. Using low/no code tools might be very hard/unlikely

Thanks, yes I think this is the right direction. Surprised it doesn’t exist as SAAS, I guess demand isn’t there.

If you want the pdf to look anything like the email, you will need to render it in a browser and capture a pdf. It’s not particularly hard if you know what you’re doing.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#53
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Azure AI Document Intelligence? In theory it's exactly this...

I second this, that or have you tried GPT-4 Vision or Donut?

I second trying GPT-4 Vision, though they have dumbed it down a bit since launch.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#54
post #2

Nice. I've been looking for something like this to self-host, to avoid my partner uploading sensitive documents to random PDF manipulation websites. Any better alternatives I should be considering?

Does it need to be a self hosted web based tool or do you just need PDF software? If the latter I find PDF Expert to be powerful and nice to use.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#55

I have a PDF problem that I thought was simple but has proven difficult to solve and there is no paid solution I’ve found… I want to forward an email to an inbox, have the email body converted into a PDF, and then email that attachment to someone all automatically. I’ve tried Make, Zapier, pdf.co, pdftool, and a few other tools but have had no success. Has anyone solved this problem reliably?

If you have access to O365 (or whatever it is called this week) this would be easy to do using powerautomate

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#56
post #43

I’ll join some other commenters, to add my favorite difficult pdf problem that I haven’t found a ready to use (even paid) solution for: extract key value pairs from a filled form such as this medical claims form: https://imgur.com/a/EJDi7L7 There are two levels of difficulty: the starting file could be an image (pdf or png or jpg), which is the most difficult scenario. The slightly easier one is where it’s a text-bas…

Dev here for the above stirling pdf app, Please raise features like this as a feature request github issue ticket and we can try address it in future!

I would do exactly what you have done here if I were the dev of the said app. But with the luxury of being an outsider, a user has expressed an inconvenience and it seems to make sense, then if I were to be the dev of the app here, wouldn't I go and create the ticket in whatever system with a link to this post instead of asking the user of the app to follow the red tape? I know there are places where this is not incentivised so this is a question for your org and not for you.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#57
post #2

Nice. I've been looking for something like this to self-host, to avoid my partner uploading sensitive documents to random PDF manipulation websites. Any better alternatives I should be considering?

I use pdftool.org which I saw on HN a while back

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#58
post #18

I still couldn't find a tool for a difficult problem to solve. I have some magazines in PDF, with layouts in two columns, etc. I want them to be transformed into Markdown. I know, it should identify automatically the two columns, different layouts, etc. I am not desiring something perfect - I can fix if ther are some errors, but so far nothing has come with a good result.

Depending on how much you're willing to pay, the OpenAI GPT-Vision API can definitely do this extremely well.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#59
post #18

I still couldn't find a tool for a difficult problem to solve. I have some magazines in PDF, with layouts in two columns, etc. I want them to be transformed into Markdown. I know, it should identify automatically the two columns, different layouts, etc. I am not desiring something perfect - I can fix if ther are some errors, but so far nothing has come with a good result.

I use Briss for this: https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0

It overlays all the pages on top of each other, you the human draws rectangles around the stacked columns in the easy GUI, and then it processes them into pages.

Re: Stirling-PDF: local web application to perform various operations on PDFs

#60
post #5

https://tools.pdf24.org/en/creator This tools is not open source, but it’s free. Files should remain on local pc. Developers claim that they make money only by advertisement on their website.

Wow, it covers almost anything, including redacting text.
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