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

Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#21

Post by password4321 »

treetalker wrote: post #15

I presume this doesn't handle handwriting. Does anyone have a suggestion for locally converting PDFs of handwriting into text, say on a recent Mac? Use case would be converting handwritten journals and daily note-taking.

I don't know re: handwriting so only barely relevant but here is a new contender for a CLI "OCR Tool using Apple's Vision Framework API": https://github.com/riddleling/macocr which I found while searching for this recent discussion:

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310944

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#22

Post by fcoury »

I really wanted this to be good. Unfortunately it converted a page that contained a table that is usually very hard for converters to properly convert and I got a full page with "! Picture 1:" and nothing else. On top of that, it hung at page 17 of a 25 page document and never resumed.

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#23

Post by thorum »

I’ve been trying to convert a dense 60 page paper document to Markdown today from photos taken on my iPhone. I know this is probably not the best way to do it but it’s still been surprising to find that even the latest cloud models are struggling to process many of the pages. Lots of hallucination and “I can’t see the text” (when the photo is perfectly clear). Lots of retrying different models, switching between LLMs and old fashioned OCR, reading and correcting mistakes myself. It’s still faster than doing the whole transcription manually but I thought the tech was further along.

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#24

Post by nawazgafar »

fcoury wrote: post #22

I really wanted this to be good. Unfortunately it converted a page that contained a table that is usually very hard for converters to properly convert and I got a full page with "! Picture 1:" and nothing else. On top of that, it hung at page 17 of a 25 page document and never resumed.

Author here, that sucks. I'd love to recreate this locally. Would you be willing to share the PDF?

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#25

Post by bugglebeetle »

thorum wrote: post #23

I’ve been trying to convert a dense 60 page paper document to Markdown today from photos taken on my iPhone. I know this is probably not the best way to do it but it’s still been surprising to find that even the latest cloud models are struggling to process many of the pages. Lots of hallucination and “I can’t see the text” (when the photo is perfectly clear). Lots of retrying different models, switching between LLMs…

Try this:

https://github.com/rednote-hilab/dots.ocr

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#28

Post by ahmedhawas123 »

This may be a bit of an irrelevant and at best imaginative rant, but there is no shortage of solutions that are mediocre or near perfect for specific use cases out there to parse PDFs. This is a great addition to that.

That said, over the last two years I've come across many use cases to parse PDFs and each has its own requirements (e.g., figuring out titles, removing page numbers, extracting specific sections, etc). And each require a different approach.

My point is, this is awesome, but I wonder if there needs to be a broader push / initiative to stop leveraging PDFs so much when things like HTML, XML, JSON and a million other formats exist. It's a hard undertaking I know, no doubt, but it's not unheard of to drop technologies (e.g., fax) for a better technology.

Re: Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs

#30

Post by mdaniel »

leodip wrote: post #10

Nice! I wonder what is the hardware required to run qwen2.5vl locally. A 6gb 2cpu VPS can do?

It does not appear that qwen2.5vl is one thing, so it would depend a great deal on the size you wish to use

Also, watch out, it seems the weights do not carry a libre license https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen2.5-VL-3B-Instruct/blob/main...

Post reply on HN