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0 pointscaspper691y ago0 comments

Ok, I will need to work on my reading comprehension skills.

That being said, I thought the purpose of OCR was to take text from a non-digital source and make it digital.

Why should we have to OCR something that exists already in a perfectly interchangeable digital format already?

0 comments

> Why should we have to OCR something that exists already in a perfectly interchangeable digital format already?

I'm with you in spirit, but in this specific context I think it's because the alternative would require the ~~LLM~~ Agent to be an HTML parser, or be bright enough to write themselves a Scrapy crawler. I suspect folks decided it's cheaper (by some metric) to just use the normal browser machinery to render 45MB worth of HTML, JS, CSS, Cloudflare Spooge, etc into a PNG and then rip the actual content out of that

I was also going to offer as a counterexample: PDF

caspper69OP1y ago

Not everyone does their work in a web browser.

And even still, you don’t have to parse raw markup to grab properties from DOM elements. That could be handled by a browser plugin coupled with some some user guided training.

PDF is another beast entirely. I think there’s already a whole thread about that going on now. I’m going to zip my lips. I’m still waiting on Adobe to return my call from two years ago inquiring about the licensing costs of their parsing library for a small shop. Good thing I wasn’t relying on them to get that project done, and thank goodness for oss.

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