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Commit 06fc0df

Rendered at 11:17:55 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Rails + React on Rails RSC.

Show HN: Sygal – Convert PDFs, scans and web pages to Markdown, locally (sygal.app)

46 points by cyrillsemah 5d ago | 15 comments

axm997 5d ago
https://github.com/amitxm/AIDocPrep is the one I built that is true local OCR. I made sure there is NO internet use, even accidentally. Also, added redaction.
kennywinker 5d ago
Seems like it sends your documents to the LLM of your choice. In what world is that “locally”??
MrDrMcCoy 5d ago
LLMs have been self-hostable for a while now.
kennywinker 5d ago
I am aware, but unless it includes a model and model runner, it’s not offering local it’s allowing local.
theybash 5d ago
Why would I just not route my docs to my local vlm/llm directly? which I already currently do.
MrDrMcCoy 5d ago
That is an entirely different question. If you like your current solution, there's no reason to switch.
fishisnow 5d ago
I built a free tool(https://mdpdf.net), based on the fast PDF conversion library (https://github.com/firecrawl/pdf-inspector). It runs entirely in the user’s browser. In my view, the biggest pain points when converting PDF to Markdown are whether it can properly handle content like tables and code blocks, as well as OCR. Current OCR approaches don’t seem very effective unless you use an LLM.
cameronbedard 5d ago
How does this differ from open source cli tools such as Marker (https://github.com/datalab-to/marker)?

Also, it seems disingenuous to have “locally” in the title when your default is cloud inference providers and I don't see you naming a recommended LLM that could be hosted locally and is proven to work well for this task. You list “Your files” under “Stays on your machine” and then require an API key for a cloud provider.

mrkn1 5d ago
Worth noting there’s also textsnap if you want something that’s actually local end-to-end via ONNX on CPU, no GPU, no API key, nothing leaves your machine. https://github.com/kouhxp/textsnap
bbor 5d ago
Shoutout to marker-2. By far the best OCR system, IME. The amount of annoying little edge cases they know about and cover for you is dizzying
cachius 5d ago
As a service: https://into.md/
darccio 5d ago
Docling is also a tool to consider, purely local, even though it's now AI-friendly too: https://docling.ai/
neronuser 5d ago
Have someone actually used it? Any feedback? There are a lot of alternatives at the moment, all of them break on complex excel documents
Benard-dev 5d ago
I am also building an app that converts web pages to Markdown. How do you handle messy scans and tables?
notkant 5d ago
i really need this tool like these concepts