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PDF to Text, a challenging problem

(www.marginalia.nu)
357 points ingve | 2 comments | 13 May 25 15:01 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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andrethegiant ◴[13 May 25 16:05 UTC] No.43974436[source]▶
Cloudflare’s ai.toMarkdown() function available in Workers AI can handle PDFs pretty easily. Judging from speed alone, it seems they’re parsing the actual content rather than shoving into OCR/LLM.

Shameless plug: I use this under the hood when you prefix any PDF URL with https://pure.md/ to convert to raw text.

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1. _boffin_ ◴[13 May 25 16:14 UTC] No.43974535[source]▶
You’re aware that PDFs are containers that can hold various formats, which can be interlaced in different ways, such as on top, throughout, or in unexpected and unspecified ways that aren’t “parsable,” right?

I would wager that they’re using OCR/LLM in their pipeline.

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2. andrethegiant ◴[13 May 25 16:23 UTC] No.43974640[source]▶
Could be. But their pricing for the conversion is free, which leads me to believe LLMs are not involved.