45 points cyrillsemah 2 days ago 15 comments

Benard-dev 2 days ago | parent

I am also building an app that converts web pages to Markdown. How do you handle messy scans and tables?

cameronbedard 1 day ago | parent

How does this differ from open source cli tools such as Marker (https://github.com/datalab-to/marker)?

Also, it seems disingenuous to have “locally” in the title when your default is cloud inference providers and I don't see you naming a recommended LLM that could be hosted locally and is proven to work well for this task. You list “Your files” under “Stays on your machine” and then require an API key for a cloud provider.

bbor 1 day ago | parent

Shoutout to marker-2. By far the best OCR system, IME. The amount of annoying little edge cases they know about and cover for you is dizzying

mrkn1 1 day ago | parent

Worth noting there’s also textsnap if you want something that’s actually local end-to-end via ONNX on CPU, no GPU, no API key, nothing leaves your machine. https://github.com/kouhxp/textsnap

axm997 1 day ago | parent

https://github.com/amitxm/AIDocPrep is the one I built that is true local OCR. I made sure there is NO internet use, even accidentally. Also, added redaction.

cachius 1 day ago | parent

As a service: https://into.md/

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

Seems like it sends your documents to the LLM of your choice. In what world is that “locally”??

MrDrMcCoy 1 day ago | parent

LLMs have been self-hostable for a while now.

kennywinker 1 day ago | parent

I am aware, but unless it includes a model and model runner, it’s not offering local it’s allowing local.

theybash 1 day ago | parent

Why would I just not route my docs to my local vlm/llm directly? which I already currently do.

MrDrMcCoy 1 day ago | parent

That is an entirely different question. If you like your current solution, there's no reason to switch.

fishisnow 1 day ago | parent

I built a free tool(https://mdpdf.net), based on the fast PDF conversion library (https://github.com/firecrawl/pdf-inspector). It runs entirely in the user’s browser. In my view, the biggest pain points when converting PDF to Markdown are whether it can properly handle content like tables and code blocks, as well as OCR. Current OCR approaches don’t seem very effective unless you use an LLM.

notkant 1 day ago | parent

i really need this tool like these concepts

darccio 1 day ago | parent

Docling is also a tool to consider, purely local, even though it's now AI-friendly too: https://docling.ai/

neronuser 1 day ago | parent

Have someone actually used it? Any feedback? There are a lot of alternatives at the moment, all of them break on complex excel documents