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Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

This is nice but Tesseract does not perform well when it comes to tables, at least when I tried it on multiple documents.

It would miss some cells from a table, or does not recognise all the numbers when they have commas.

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Tables are still the big unsolved problem for me.

There are a ton of potential tools out there like Tabula and AWS Textract table mode but none of them have felt like the perfect solution.

I've been trying Gemini Pro 1.5 and Claude 3 Opus and they looked like they worked... but in both cases I spotted them getting confused and copying in numbers form the wrong rows.

I think the best I've tried is the camera import mode in iOS Excel! Just wish there was an API for calling that one programmatically.

Google and Azure have their own PDF Table extraction service but I have noticed Textract is a bit better.

Out of curiosity have you tried ocrs by Robert Knight? https://github.com/robertknight/ocrs

No I hadn't heard of that one!

I think the camera import on Excel MacOS works pretty well. You could probably call that version through an API.

Would this be helpful? https://github.com/facebookresearch/nougat

Seems like it can handle tables.

If you're on Windows try https://table2xl.com (disclosure: I'm the founder), it's more accurate than Excel's camera import. No API though.

As mentioned above, give Unstract a try: https://github.com/Zipstack/unstract

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