Show HN: Sygal – Convert PDFs, scans and web pages to Markdown, locally

https://github.com/amitxm/AIDocPrep is the one I built that is true local OCR. I made sure there is NO internet use, even accidentally. Also, added redaction.

I built a free tool(https://mdpdf.net), based on the fast PDF conversion library (https://github.com/firecrawl/pdf-inspector). It runs entirely in the user’s browser. In my view, the biggest pain points when converting PDF to Markdown are whether it can properly handle content like tables and code blocks, as well as OCR. Current OCR approaches don’t seem very effective unless you use an LLM.

Seems like it sends your documents to the LLM of your choice. In what world is that “locally”??

Docling is also a tool to consider, purely local, even though it's now AI-friendly too: https://docling.ai/

How does this differ from open source cli tools such as Marker (https://github.com/datalab-to/marker)?

Also, it seems disingenuous to have “locally” in the title when your default is cloud inference providers and I don't see you naming a recommended LLM that could be hosted locally and is proven to work well for this task. You list “Your files” under “Stays on your machine” and then require an API key for a cloud provider.

Have someone actually used it? Any feedback? There are a lot of alternatives at the moment, all of them break on complex excel documents

As a service: https://into.md/

I am also building an app that converts web pages to Markdown. How do you handle messy scans and tables?

i really need this tool like these concepts