AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to PDF to MD by LLMs – Extract Text/Tables/Image Descriptives by GPT4o
I've developed a Python API service that uses GPT-4o for OCR on PDFs. It features parallel processing and batch handling for improved performance. Not only does it convert PDF to markdown, but it also describes the images within the PDF using captions like `[Image: This picture shows 4 people waving]`. In testing with NASA's Apollo 17 flight documents, it successfully converted complex, multi-oriented pages into well-structured Markdown. The project is open-source and available on GitHub. Feedback is welcome.
PDF to MD by LLMs is a Python API service that converts PDF documents into structured Markdown format using GPT-4o for optical character recognition. It extracts text, tables, and generates descriptive captions for… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. PDF to MD by LLMs – Extract Text/Tables/Image Descriptives by GPT4o launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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📄 PDF/IMG ->.MD/JSON Document OCR API for PaddleOCR and GLMOCR. Self-hostable. - majcheradam/ocrbase
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Almost exactly 1 year ago, I submitted something to HN about using Llama2 (which had just come out) to improve the output of Tesseract OCR by correcting obvious OCR errors [0]. That was exciting at the time because OpenAI's API calls were still quite expensive for GPT4, and the cost of running it on a book-length PDF would just be prohibitive. In contrast, you could run Llama2 locally on a machine with just a CPU, and it would be extremely slow, but "free" if you had a spare machine lying around. Well, it's amazing how things have changed since then. Not only have models gotten a lot better,…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Megaparse [LW24]▲289Open-source Document Parser to Markdown with OCR/LLMs
2024 · megaparse.com · its alternatives →
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note.md▲280your notes and research documentation now a local LLM Memory
Jun 2026 · notemd.org · its alternatives →
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Monkt▲305Transform files and web pages into AI-ready Markdown or JSON
2025 · monkt.com · its alternatives →
- 7PT
Hi, OP here. A friend was involved in a custody battle and was afraid his ex was going to leak all of his discovery documents on the internet and he asked if there was something I could do to make it harder for bots/crawlers to find sensitive information. Originally I was going to turn all of his docs to image based PDFs, but those get large fast and are easy to OCR. So I found a post musing about altering fonts/glyphs so that it looks like english, but the actual character being seen by the pdf reader is a non-english character. As such, when you try to OCR these files, it doesn't…
2022 · humaneyesonly.com · its alternatives →
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showmd▲204Markdown was never meant to be previewed plain text
Apr 2026 · showmd.yetanother.one · its alternatives →
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Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PDFify▲230Free macOS text recognition, PDF composition & compression
2018 · pdfify.app · its alternatives →
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MDV — a Markdown superset for documents, dashboards, and slides with embedded data and visualizations. HTML + PDF export, live preview, VS Code extension. - drasimwagan/mdv
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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PDF Dino▲155Extract structured tables from messy PDFs using AI. Export to Excel, CSV, or JSON. Try 20 pages free—no credit card needed.
2025 · pdfdino.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, solo dev here. After years of frustration with how LLMs handle complex documents, especially PDFs with tables, I decided to build a solution myself. My approach uses a Markdown conversion step to preserve the table structure, which seems to work surprisingly well for chunking. This little parser is the first public piece of a much larger, privacy-focused AI platform I'm building. I'm pretty much running on fumes financially, so any feedback, critique, or support is massively appreciated. Happy to answer any questions about the approach!
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Open Source Document Management System for Digital Archives (Scanned Documents) - ciur/papermerge
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Markdrop▲12PDF to markdown | Tables to Excel | Table/Images Description
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I have always searched for a simple tool which can convert a MD document to a well styled small PDF, just like a GitHub Readme. This was inspired by TinyPDF https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46316968 I also used this project to get familiar with agentic coding, which I had dreaded before. mdpdf supports: - using the included PDF fonts to generate tiny valid PDFs - outputs as A4 or Letter depending on your locale - plenty of common MD syntax: code blocks, inline code, lists, tables, and jpg and png images That's it. It covers probably most of the use cases and can help to…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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If you just want to use it, try here - https://pdf2md.trieve.ai . I think the LLM's are astoundingly good at converting complex powerpoint style infographics. I wouldn't normally think folks on HN would find this interesting as the general concept has been posted about already in the past few months. We were heavily inspired by Zerox[1]. However, the stack we went with was fun and over-engineered which is more likely to create interesting discussion. We use all the same tools at Trieve (our main product), but wanted to see if they would be a good fit for something that needed to…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
OCR/Document extraction field has seen lot of action recently with releases like Mixtral OCR, Andrew Ng's agentic document processing etc. Also there are several benchmarks for OCR, however all testing for something slightly different which make good comparison of models very hard. To give an example, some models like mixtral-ocr only try to convert a document to markdown format. You have to use another LLM on top of it to get the final result. Some VLM’s directly give structured information like key fields from documents like invoices, but you have to either add business rules on top…
2025 · nanonets.com · its alternatives →
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I've been disappointed by the very poor quality of results that I generally get when trying to run OCR on older scanned documents, especially ones that are typewritten or otherwise have unusual or irregular typography. I recently had the idea of using Llama2 to use common sense reasoning and subject level expertise to correct transcription errors in a "smart" way-- basically doing what a human proofreader who is familiar with the topic might do. I came up with the linked script that takes a PDF as input, runs Tesseract on it to get an initial text extraction, and then feeds this…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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This project reconstructs the Epstein email records from the recent U.S. House Oversight Committee releases using only public-domain documents (23,124 image files + 2,800 OCR text files). Most email pages contain only one real message, buried under layers of repeated headers/footers. I wanted to rebuild the conversations without all the surrounding noise. I used an OCR + vision-LLM pipeline to extract individual messages from the email screenshots, normalize senders/recipients, rebuild timestamps, detect duplicates, and map threads. The output is a structured SQLite database that…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24FA
Hi HN, Like everyone, I'm working on an product that uses LLMs to extract data from photos and documents. Part of the processing pipeline is extracting data from PDFs as raw text or a raster image. As part of our leadgen strategy, we've opened our REST API that lets you process pages of a PDF. The API is completely free to use anonymously, but is rate limited to 1 page per 30 seconds. Creating a free account removes this restriction. The two endpoints are: - https://extract.dev/api/pages/extract/raster - Rasterize a page of a PDF -…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →