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168 points Tammilore | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.214s | source

Documind is an open-source tool that turns documents into structured data using AI.

What it does:

- Extracts specific data from PDFs based on your custom schema - Returns clean, structured JSON that's ready to use - Works with just a PDF link + your schema definition

Just run npm install documind to get started.

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emmanueloga_ ◴[] No.42173837[source]
From the source, Documind appears to:

1) Install tools like Ghostscript, GraphicsMagick, and LibreOffice with a JS script. 2) Convert document pages to Base64 PNGs and send them to OpenAI for data extraction. 3) Use Supabase for unclear reasons.

Some issues with this approach:

* OpenAI may retain and use your data for training, raising privacy concerns [1].

* Dependencies should be managed with Docker or package managers like Nix or Pixi, which are more robust. Example: a tool like Parsr [2] provides a Dockerized pdf-to-json solution, complete with OCR support and an HTTP api.

* GPT-4 vision seems like a costly, error-prone, and unreliable solution, not really suited for extracting data from sensitive docs like invoices, without review.

* Traditional methods (PDF parsers with OCR support) are cheaper, more reliable, and avoid retention risks for this particular use case. Although these tools do require some plumbing... probably LLMs can really help with that!

While there are plenty of tools for structured data extraction, I think there’s still room for a streamlined, all-in-one solution. This gap likely explains the abundance of closed-source commercial options tackling this very challenge.

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1: https://platform.openai.com/docs/models#how-we-use-your-data

2: https://github.com/axa-group/Parsr

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themanmaran ◴[] No.42178185[source]
Disappointed to see this is an exact rip of our open source tool zerox [1]. With no attribution. They also took the MIT License and changed it out for an AGPL.

If you inspect the source code, it's a verbatim copy. They literally just renamed the ZeroxOutput to DocumindOutput [2][3]

[1] https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox

[2] https://github.com/DocumindHQ/documind/blob/main/core/src/ty...

[3] https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox/blob/main/node-zerox/src...

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1. dontdoxxme ◴[] No.42200734[source]
For the MIT license to make sense it needs a copyright notice, I don’t actually see one in the original license. It just says “The MIT license” but then the text below references the above copyright notice, which doesn’t exist.

I think both sides here can learn from this, copyright notices are technically not required but when some text references them it is very useful. The original author should have added one. The user of the code could also have asked about the copyright. If this were to go to court having the original license not making sense could create more questions than it should.

tl;dr: add a copyright line at the top of the file when you’re using the MIT license.