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Comment by mvac | Hacker News Reader

How does it compare to Datalab/Marker https://github.com/datalab-to/marker ? We evaluated many PDF->MD converters and this one performed the best, though it is not perfect.

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As anecdotal evidence, it serves my complex-enough purposes very well - mathematics and code interspersed together. One of my "litmus test" papers is this old paper on a Fortran inverse-Laplace transform algorithm [1] that intersperses inline and display equations, and monospace code blocks, while requiring OCR from scratch, and very few models currently do a satisfactory job, i.e. in the following page transcribed by Marker,

https://imgur.com/a/Q7UYIfW

the inline $\sigma_0$ is mangled as "<sup>s</sup> 0", and $f(t)$ is mangled as "f~~t*!". The current model gets them both correct.

Hi, author of marker here - I tried your image, and I don't see the issues you're describing with the newest version of marker (1.7.5).

I ran both with no setting specified, and with force_ocr, and I didn't see the issues either time.

Hi there - thanks for getting back to me. I do genuinely want this workflow to work - Marker has been very useful for other purposes for me!

I’m currently using the Datalab online playground with default settings - does that enable inline math recognition?

I assume you're using a PDF, and not the image you shared? You need to set force ocr or format lines to get inline math with a PDF (for images, we just OCR everything anyways, so you don't need any settings).

We're working on improving the playground generally now - expect a big update tomorrow, which among other things will default to format lines.

Thanks for the kind words! The team was just me until pretty recently, but we're growing quickly and will be addressing a lot of issues quickly in the next few weeks.

Perfect - it works! Yes, I’m glad for all the time you’ve spent on this project: one of my ulterior goals is to make technical documentation for old systems and their programming environments accessible to LLMs, so that programming in retro computing can benefit from the advances in productivity that modern languages have. I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other user stories like that :)

I am just getting started with my own cross-comparison, would appreciate your list of considered candidates if you have it handy.

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