Hacker News: GirkovArpa

Ask HN: How to OCR a PDF and preserve whitespace?

GirkovArpa — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 19:43:25 +0000

I have some rather large PDFs that need to be transcribed, but every service I try has some minor but deal-breaking flaw.

Either they don't support PDFs this large (hundreds of pages), are just really bad at English OCR, or, most commonly, don't preserve whitespace correctly.

The number one problem is whitespace when it comes to multiple columns (similar to newspapers). Either not putting any spaces between words, or when there are multiple columns of text, putting rows in the wrong order. If it was just a single page, this would still be useful, since I could fix it myself. But I have over 1000 pages.

I tried so many free services and trials that I just got charged for forgetting to cancel one (thanks to smallpdf.com for refunding my $12). Is OCR technology just not there yet when it comes to multiple-column pages? Yet, this does not seem to be an issue with newspapers.com, based on my experience using their text search feature. I would like to know what OCR software they are using.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40612190

Points: 26

# Comments: 17

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Scientists have traced human tail loss to a short sequence of genetic code"

GirkovArpa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:56:48 +0000

This comment needs to be higher.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "“Emergent” abilities in LLMs actually develop gradually and predictably – study"

GirkovArpa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 22:47:39 +0000

> You can ask them to reverse numbers or re-arrange words and they'll faceplant in the same way as soon as the input gets beyond a small threshold. Here surely there wouldn't be an issue with tokenization.

My guess is the training data contains many short pairs of forward and backward sequences, but none after a certain threshold length (due to how quickly the number of possible sequences grows with length). This would imply there's no actual reversing going on, and the LLM is instead using the training data as a lookup table.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Show HN: Glossarie – a new, immersive way to learn a language"

GirkovArpa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:34:39 +0000

This should work fantastic in theory, since differing vocabulary (not grammar) is the main factor that determines the difficulty of a new language. Putting off this primary obstacle so one can ease into it sounds genius to me. It also agrees with the method hyped by Steve Kaufman, where one should read and speak level-appropriate material.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Anglo-Italian company says it has cracked Bitcoin. People have questions"

GirkovArpa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:26:50 +0000

Exactly. The proof they did not actually crack Bitcoin is the fact they said they did.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis"

GirkovArpa — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 16:24:13 +0000

In the context of Condorcet's jury theorem, the percentages refer to the chance of voting for the correct outcome. Think of a legal trial and there is no ambiguity about the meaning of "50%" is.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "The baffling intelligence of a single cell: The story of E. coli chemotaxis"

GirkovArpa — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 14:54:59 +0000

According to Condorcet's jury theorem, a committee of 10 identical members may be smarter than a single member.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Netlify just sent me a $104k bill for a simple static site"

GirkovArpa — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 19:12:55 +0000

Yes. Back around 2020 they forgave me a $1000 bill for a side project I thought was running on a free tier.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Show HN: Minimalist CSS Framework"

GirkovArpa — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 23:42:28 +0000

I love it! Going to use this instead of Pure.CSS from now on.

Show HN: GameScripter.JS – Sciter-based game engine inspired by DragonRuby

GirkovArpa — Tue, 27 Sep 2022 23:37:04 +0000

If you're not familiar with DragonRuby, you can check out a live demo here:

http://fiddle.dragonruby.org.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws....

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33002548

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Show HN: Handwriting Synthesis with Machine Learning and Sciter.js [Demo]"

GirkovArpa — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 23:47:19 +0000

Hello HN — This is a desktop app that accepts typed text and synthesizes a handwritten version of it, using recurrent neural networks in real time. The network is implemented as a library (included in the Releases section), written in 100% Rust. The GUI is based on the free Sciter.JS library, which supports SVG and the fancy controls. All this is an unofficial port of https://calligrapher.ai

By clicking the download button at the top-left, the output can be saved as SVG.

Show HN: Handwriting Synthesis with Machine Learning and Sciter.js [Demo]

GirkovArpa — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 23:46:43 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/GirkovArpa/calligrapher-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28094135

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Sweden is being shot up"

GirkovArpa — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 05:57:09 +0000

> All the languages in Europe descended from the Proto-Indo-European language

Except for Basque!

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Show HN: Generate realistic handwriting without neural networks [demo]"

GirkovArpa — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 00:47:50 +0000

Hey HN — This is a simple web app that allows you to draw an alphabet, type some text, and then have the text written in your own handwriting. I’m happy to hear feedback or answer questions about how it works!

P.S. Drawing the entire alphabet isn't needed, only the letters you need.

Compare to:

https://www.calligrapher.ai/

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html

Show HN: Generate realistic handwriting without neural networks [demo]

GirkovArpa — Thu, 22 Jul 2021 00:33:25 +0000

Article URL: https://fake-handwriting.herokuapp.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27913942

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Show HN: CalDOM: An agnostic, reactive and minimalist JavaScript UI library"

GirkovArpa — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 03:08:24 +0000

Sciter is really great.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Are we GUI Yet? The state of building user interfaces in Rust"

GirkovArpa — Fri, 16 Jul 2021 23:22:55 +0000

> you can't distribute the binaries yourself

You can :) You just have to include a copyright notice unless you purchase an exemption.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Ask HN: Desktop Programming Language"

GirkovArpa — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 20:42:41 +0000

I recommend Sciter.JS as a lightweight alternative to Electron. It's less than 10mb.

If you visit the repo here: https://github.com/c-smile/sciter-js-sdk

There's a database demo in samples/sqlite.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Nuklear: A cross-platform GUI library in C"

GirkovArpa — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 05:27:55 +0000

How does this compare to Sciter? I understand this is primarily to overlay UIs over full screen applications (like games), but Sciter has that capability as well. Particularly how easy is it to style things, considering Sciter allows CSS?

I did a CTRL+F for "sciter" and usually I find something, but this time, nope.

New comment by GirkovArpa in "Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust"

GirkovArpa — Sat, 20 Feb 2021 21:42:48 +0000

Would you be able to mention these apps? I would like to take a look.