Built a tool solve the nightmare of chunking tables in PDF vs. Markdown
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!
In plain words
This tool helps developers chunk PDF documents while preserving table structure, a common problem when processing complex files with language models. It converts PDFs to Markdown format to maintain table integrity during the chunking process. Built by a solo developer, it serves as the first public component of a larger privacy-focused AI platform. The tool is available on GitHub and designed for those working with document processing and LLM workflows.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
Does the same job
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ChunkHound’s goal is simple: local-first codebase intelligence that helps you pull deep, core-dev-level insights on demand, generate always-up-to-date docs, and scale from small repos to enterprise monorepos — while staying free + open source and provider-agnostic (VoyageAI / OpenAI / Qwen3, Anthropic / OpenAI / Gemini / Grok, and more). I’d love your feedback — and if you have, thank you for being part of the journey!
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I built this because I often need clean Markdown from PDFs for writing, documentation, and LLM workflows. Most existing tools either flatten everything into text or rely purely on OCR. I wanted something that preserves structure and is actually usable in Markdown. Feedback welcome.
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I’m one of the co-founders of Doctly AI. I wanted to share our story. We didn’t originally set out to build a PDF-to-Markdown parser. It all started when we were building a RAG solution for a company that deals with regulatory agencies. All of their data was in PDFs, and as it is apparently with lawyers, they like to print and scan documents to make it hard on their counterparts. These documents contained complex tables that barely make sense, are rotated, and handwriting is mixed in between. Many pages are number ruled and potentially rotated. We spent a lot of time trying to get clean data…
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Hello It's been quite frustrating to find an online tool that will easily extract tables from PDFs. So I built one. https://www.tablex.dev Hope you enjoy it.
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