Re:Show HN: Open-source Rule-based PDF parser for RAG
by ramoz on Wednesday January 24, 2024 @09:09AM
(#39117508)
There’s no ocr or ai involved here (other than the standard fallback).
What this library, and something like fitz/pymupdf, allow you to do is extract the text straight from the pdf, using rules about how to parse & structure it. (Most modern pdfs you can extract text without ocr).
- much cheaper obviously but doesn’t scale (across dynamic layouts) well so you likely are using this when you can configure around a standard structure. I have found rule-based text extraction to work fairly dynamically though for things like scientific pdfs.
What this library, and something like fitz/pymupdf, allow you to do is extract the text straight from the pdf, using rules about how to parse & structure it. (Most modern pdfs you can extract text without ocr).
- much cheaper obviously but doesn’t scale (across dynamic layouts) well so you likely are using this when you can configure around a standard structure. I have found rule-based text extraction to work fairly dynamically though for things like scientific pdfs.