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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

#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

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

#32

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

Yes, there is an enormous interest in this kind of thing, not the least in larger organizations with tons of PDF documents in various forms.

Even though this would only cover a small part of the needs or use cases, it will still be hugely useful if it works well.

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

#33
post #32

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

Yes, there is an enormous interest in this kind of thing, not the least in larger organizations with tons of PDF documents in various forms. Even though this would only cover a small part of the needs or use cases, it will still be hugely useful if it works well.

cough L cough L cough M cough anyone? :)

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

#35
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is an enormous interest in this kind of thing, not the least in larger organizations with tons of PDF documents in various forms. Even though this would only cover a small part of the needs or use cases, it will still be hugely useful if it works well.

cough L cough L cough M cough anyone? :)

Yeah, I know, but a lot of this content can be pretty sensitive, and might not be allowed to upload outside organization networks sometimes (hospitals, governments etc).

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

#36

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 fo…

I had this use case also in mind. Already tried with one book, but the results were not that good. Many of the tables and text boxes were messed up. I had pretty good results converting tables to markdown with ChatGPT by taking a screenshot of a table and pasting it to chat. It was able to handle some "irregular" tables with a bit of prompting. Like "Read the table row by row. Column headers are X, Y, Z. X is text, Y is number, Z is word" as a simplified example.

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

#37
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cough L cough L cough M cough anyone? :)

Yeah, I know, but a lot of this content can be pretty sensitive, and might not be allowed to upload outside organization networks sometimes (hospitals, governments etc).

Like most software, LLMs can be run locally, or on private infrastructure. This was on the front page yesterday, which is not the only way to run an LLM locally, but about the easiest way possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38464057

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

#38
post #5

Are there any other libraries or online services that does this well? I have a large number of PDFs from government agencies. I’ve tried AWS Textract and works fairly well.

[flagged]

Suggest adding a disclaimer that you are the founder

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

#39
post #13

It'd be really great if there was something like this that also supported image extraction

My current workflow (for getting a magazine onto a website) is Calibre's HTMLZ export, then through Pandoc to markdown. It produces good enough Markdown to feed in to Hugo, and extracts images. I've been through a number of options in the past and this is what I've settled on.

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

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

#40

Great stuff! I have a question regarding the output of Nougat: Where do the "hallucinations" come from (just scroll through the Nougat output of the Think Python example to see what I mean)? Nevermind, i just read it runs it through an LLM, so hallucinations are par for the course.

I think these sorts of tools are dangerous at least until the hallucination (in text or formatting) rate is below that experienced by a careful reader repeatedly re-reading a document, which is almost but not quite zero and, depending on the application, potentially even until it's actually zero. I guess they're mostly fine for cases where the extact document content isn't important, but it's probably not common to have a lot of documents that nobody anywhere considers or ever will consider important yet which must be more accessible than pdfs.
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