> Converts an image to a single-page PDF with a hidden text layer using Tesseract. This is the 'State Preservation' step.
Does this mean the text only pdf page is transformed into an image that covers the full page, but the text is still under there. So, any machine based extraction would still get the text, but would probably loose all the bounding box information and regular users cannot just use their mouse to select text anymore?
OP here, I added a sample PDF output in the project assets and put screenshots in the ReadMe. The text is selectable after rehydration. would this work with your app?
It might be feasible to have an intermediate AI call take the generated image and slice it into individual text and image elements that it would then render into the pdf page
Behold, the might of LLMs! Instead of ushering the age of AGI as advertised 6 months ago, now it cleans your PDFs for you.
Many thanks to humanity for failing to standardise PDF and this project for paying interest on that tech debt with datacenter levels of energy consumption.
Very nice! I wonder whether that could be used to get LLMs to annotate pdfs. Say an "agentic" CLI like Claude Code or Gemini-cli reviews a pdf and finds typos, could it use this to annotate the pdf like underlining them in red or something of that sort? That could be nice.
Do you mean example commands? we see those examples on the githib README, yes,
But people here are probably also looking for example input and output PDFs (or images/screenshots) showing the actual work done to get a sense of what to expect.
I like the example of updating latest market data. Updating a deck one-off is tedious. Keeping it updated long-term was never going to happen. But now it can
Please don't add an animated gif to your README. Nothing worse than an autoplaying video with no controls, that has 10 frames but takes 5.4MB to download. Github supports normal video files. It allows the user to rewind or pause, and it results in a much smaller file size.
Generally agreed! though fun point of info: you can use the .avif format to get something that behaves just like a gif (auto-playing, no sound, no controls) but supports modern features (HDR/transparency channel) and is compressed as well as a modern video is, since its just AV1. And it's supported in most all modern browsers these days: https://caniuse.com/?search=avif
Webm is better in many ways, but it doesn't give you gif-like behavior I think. As in, you can't just include it in an <img> tag and a get an autoplaying looping video. Though you can simulate it with <video>.
Basically, .avif is an "animated image" format, like .gif, but .webm is only a video format.
edit: just realized .webp i think can be an animated image! So that seems like the alternative
AFAIK -- even the "Designer" feature of Microsoft Powerpoint (now folded under Copilot license I believe) gives slide deigns with shapes etc that are not editable. Thankfully the text remains editable. But if we wnat to ever so slightly modify the suggested design my removing or reshaping some if the shapes ... nopes. Feels like they are worried about humans with taste ripping-off the AI output :D
I am disappointed that this doesn't modify the underlying pdf structure (which is a horror show, I know) but instead relies on fairly lossy OCR back&fourths.
I wish an agent with a validation and rendering tools could instead manipulate the structure to accomplish those edits way less destructively, checking its progress with the tools.
it will be more excited if i can use this feature in application with GUI, it’s now convenient to check the result after edit the PDF, i need to transfer between CLI and PDF reader
I recently tried to change a single word in a PDF and nearly tore my hair out (thank you LibreOffice) I'll definitely keep this in mind for next time, thank you.
PS: in my quick test of editing a PDF text -- the output PDF had weirdly added an extra "&" symbol at the end of every existing line of text. will try out more to see if it was something in the input PDF that was causing it.
Does this mean the text only pdf page is transformed into an image that covers the full page, but the text is still under there. So, any machine based extraction would still get the text, but would probably loose all the bounding box information and regular users cannot just use their mouse to select text anymore?
My Text to Speech app uses bounding box to display what text in PDF is being read and would not work well PDF's from this project.
Many thanks to humanity for failing to standardise PDF and this project for paying interest on that tech debt with datacenter levels of energy consumption.
Has anyone given any it a go? Does it work?
I haven’t tried it, but there are plenty of examples.
But people here are probably also looking for example input and output PDFs (or images/screenshots) showing the actual work done to get a sense of what to expect.
Basically, .avif is an "animated image" format, like .gif, but .webm is only a video format.
edit: just realized .webp i think can be an animated image! So that seems like the alternative
I wish an agent with a validation and rendering tools could instead manipulate the structure to accomplish those edits way less destructively, checking its progress with the tools.
After several iterations of edits, would the image quality decrease?
https://www.photopea.com/
PS: in my quick test of editing a PDF text -- the output PDF had weirdly added an extra "&" symbol at the end of every existing line of text. will try out more to see if it was something in the input PDF that was causing it.