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I index a lot of tabletop RPG books in PDF format, which often have complex visual layouts and many tables that parsers typically have difficulty with. If this
by starkparker 2y ago
I index a lot of tabletop RPG books in PDF format, which often have complex visual layouts and many tables that parsers typically have difficulty with. If this is just a wrapper around PDFMiner, as noted in another comment, I don't see any value added by this tool.
This handles them... fine. It either doesn't recognize or never attempts to handle tables, which makes it fundamentally a non-starter for my typical usage, but to its credit it seems to have at least some sense of table cells; it organizes columns in a manner that isn't fully readable but isn't as broken as some other solutions, either.
It otherwise handles text that's in variable-width columns or wrapped in complex ways around art work rather well. It inserts extraneous spaces on fully justified text, which is frustrating but not unusual, and sometimes adds extraneous line breaks on mid-sentence column breaks.
The biggest miss, though, is how it completely misses headings! This seems fundamental for any use case, including grooming sources for LLM training. It doesn't identify a single heading in any PDF I've thrown at it so far.