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Comment by pgt | Hacker News Reader

How are folks parsing PDFs with GPT4? Every 3rd party tool that supposedly uses GPT has failed for me on even the most regular of PDF bank statements. Currently I am parsing the text contents manually using pdfbox to reconstruct historical bank statements, but this is error-prone due to page breaks and run-on lines.

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I had success with having it guess the formatting, which was a pretty cool experiment.

I had a table in a PDF of registers and associated information, and I copied and pasted the text directly into ChatGPT as a big block, and asked it to structure the data as a table again based on its best understanding of the data, knowing it came from a table. To my surprise, it did a really good job. A couple small edits here and there were needed to change some formatting and it missed a couple values, but overall it took me a couple minutes to edit and I was on my way.

Chrome's "Search images with Google" is already good at extracting text. I wish they could recognize table formats within image or a page and allow it to be exported to google sheets. That would be game changer.

I think he just copy-pasted everything from the PDF to GPT4? He says:

> with the only tedious aspect being the cut-and-paste between the raw data, GPT4, and the spreadsheet

Note: I haven’t worked with PDF bank statements.

My current solution is pdfplumber → GPT-3 API. I played around with a few different options, and this is personally what’s worked best for my use cases.

Same deal for me, I've tried a few AI PDF pipelines with no good output. If I feed it cleaned up delimited text then everything's good[1], but by the time I get to that point I might as well be using Tabula + Orange / R. I'll keep trying though, because damn, PDF files need to go die under a rock.

[1] Well . . kinda. The model has some weird ideas about what an edge table is.

I'm guessing that manually feeding it a table at a time, with prompts tailored to the shapes you see in that table, is more effective than using a tool that tries to do that for you. Automated tools on top of GPT will be great when they work but they introduce a new communication joint where things can fail.

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