What is pdf-craft
pdf-craft is a tool used to convert PDF files into other formats (such as Markdown and EPUB), focusing on processing PDF files of scanned books. pdf-craft supports extracting body content and filtering out non-body elements such as headers, footers, and footnotes. By combining the DocLayout-YOLO algorithm and PaddleOCR text recognition technology, pdf-craft can effectively handle cross-page issues and generate semantically coherent text.
Main features of pdf-craft
- PDF to Markdown feature: Converts PDF to Markdown format, extracts body content while preserving structure, embeds illustrations, tables, and formulas as screenshots, and ensures the generated Markdown file is semantically coherent.
- PDF to EPUB feature: Uses large language models to build the EPUB book structure and generate a table of contents, integrates annotations and citations, corrects OCR errors, and converts to EPUB format suitable for e-book readers.
Technical principles of pdf-craft
- Page layout analysis: Performs layout analysis on PDF pages based on the DocLayout-YOLO algorithm to identify the positions and boundaries of elements such as text blocks, images, and tables. Custom algorithms are combined to further optimize layout parsing, ensuring that the extracted body content is accurate and complete.
- Text recognition: Performs text recognition based on PaddleOCR. PaddleOCR is a high-performance open-source OCR tool that can accurately recognize text content in scanned books. It recognizes and extracts text blocks on pages based on pretrained models.
- Cross-page handling: When processing cross-page text, it determines the logical relationships between text blocks based on algorithms to ensure the coherence of cross-page text.
- Reading order optimization: Determines the reading order of text blocks based on layoutreader. Based on the page layout and the positions of text blocks, it generates an order that conforms to human reading habits.
pdf-craft project address
- GitHub repository：https://github.com/oomol-lab/pdf-craft
Application scenarios of pdf-craft
- Academic research: Converts scanned academic papers into Markdown or EPUB format for easy editing, annotation, and organization.
- E-book production: Converts scanned books into EPUB format, generates a table of contents and chapter structure, and facilitates publishing and reading.
- Document archiving: Converts paper documents or PDF files into Markdown or EPUB format for long-term archiving and retrieval.
- Educational material organization: Converts scanned textbooks or lecture notes into editable formats, making it convenient for teachers to organize and students to learn.
- Personal learning: Converts scanned books or materials into Markdown format, making it convenient for personal note organization and review.