Alternatives
Products that do what UiForm – Never write a parser again, make any file LLM-ready does
Hey HN! UiForm is a document processing SDK that (1) makes any file LLM-ready, eliminating the need to write custom parsers for each format, and (2) improves structured data extraction through built-in Chain-of-Thought prompting (repo: https://github.com/UiForm/uiform, site: uiform.com). We’ve been analyzing shipping documents with LLMs for over a year with Cube. While building, we faced two major challenges in document analysis: First, each client had different document formats (PDFs, Excel sheets, emails) requiring custom parsers. Second, getting consistent, structured…
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2024 · github.com
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Outlines is a Python library that focuses on text generation with large language models. Brandon and I are not LLM experts and started the project a few months ago because we wanted to understand better how the generation process works. Our original background is probabilistic, relational and symbolic programming. Recently we came up with a fast way to generate text that matches a regex (https://blog.normalcomputing.ai/posts/2023-07-27-regex-guide...). The basic idea is simple: regular expressions have an equivalent Deterministic-Finite Automaton (DFA) representation. We…
2023 · github.com
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We're open-sourcing 14 components & examples today for PDF, DOCX, and XLSX viewers, plus bounding box citations, file upload, e-signature, and more. It's MIT licensed and fully customizable. Demo video here: https://share.extend.ai/kRmSGKRF When we started, we tried every file viewer and document component library we could find. Unfortunately, none of them had all the functionality (and polish) that we wanted, so we ended up building our own for https://extend.ai/. It was only ever meant to be internal, but enough customers kept asking for it that we decided to…
Jun 2026 · extend.ai
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When building workflows that rely on LLMs, we commonly use structured output for programmatic use cases like converting an invoice into rows or meeting transcripts into tickets or even complex PDFs into database entries. The model may return the schema you want, but with hallucinated values like `invoice_date` being off by 2 months or the transcript array ordered wrongly. The JSON is valid, but the values are not. Structured output today is a big part of using LLMs, especially when building deterministic workflows. Current structured output benchmarks (e.g., JSONSchemaBench) only validate…
Apr 2026 · interfaze.ai
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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.
2024 · github.com
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2024 · github.com
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Built this for my LLM workflows - needed searchable, persistent memory that wouldn't blow up storage costs. I also wanted to use it locally for my research. It's a content-addressed storage system with block-level deduplication (saves 30-40% on typical codebases). I have integrated the CLI tool into most of my workflows in Zed, Claude Code, and Cursor, and I provide the prompt I'm currently using in the repo. The project is in C++ and the build system is rough around the edges but is tested on macOS and Ubuntu 24.04.
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN! Over the last few months, we’ve seen many tools here trying to tackle the problem of making complex, unstructured documents ready for LLMs. The complexity primarily includes parsing highly complex documents in terms of format, layout, design, complex tables, checkboxes, etc, with high accuracy and reliability. LLMWhisperer is our take on the problem. LLMwhisperer solves most of the document complexity with reliable accuracy. With our user-friendly playground (https://pg.llmwhisperer.unstract.com/), you can effortlessly test your document use case. No sign-up is…
2024 · llmwhisperer.unstract.com
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2024 · adamgrant.info
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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
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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
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We've been building data pipelines that scrape websites and extract structured data for a while now. If you've done this, you know the drill: you write CSS selectors, the site changes its layout, everything breaks at 2am, and you spend your morning rewriting parsers. LLMs seemed like the obvious fix — just throw the HTML at GPT and ask for JSON. Except in practice, it's more painful than that: - Raw HTML is full of nav bars, footers, and tracking junk that eats your token budget. A typical product page is 80% noise. - LLMs return malformed JSON more often than you'd expect, especially with…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hi Hacker News! We’re Vadim and Chris from Highlight.io [1]. We do web app monitoring and are working on using LLMs/embeddings to add new functionality to our error monitoring product. Given that there’s a lot of founders/engineers using LLMs in their products, we figured we’d share how we built the new functionality, their impact on our workflows, and how you can try it out. Our goal was to build two features: (1) tagging errors (e.g. deeming an error as “authentication error” or a “database error”); and (2) grouping similar errors together (e.g. two errors that have a different…
2023 · github.com
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2023 · github.com
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Hi HN, Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently. As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time. The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.). A…
2025
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2024 · github.com
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2024 · instill.tech
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I've been doing some data cleaning for my fine tuning projects using LLMs, and decided to just build a package for it as a side project. Check it out here: https://github.com/databonsai/databonsai Some features: - categorization (labelling), transformation and decomposition (text into structured format) - validates llm outputs - batch mode batches up the inputs/outputs so you don't send the prompt (schema, fewshot examples) for every row of data, saving a significant amount of tokens There are some similarities to the Instructor repo, but this is simpler and made for…
2024 · github.com
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G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com
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