This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable.
Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background.
If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious.
Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately.
I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again.
I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.
Neat idea. Basically an "Enhance Readability" button. I'm looking into how it can be done, will report back.
intoXbox 4 hours ago [-]
Nice tool. I like the local approach. I think a nice feature would be to remove all PII from documents, so that users can redact PDFs and upload to their favourite LLM.
59 minutes ago [-]
philjohnson 4 hours ago [-]
Good suggestion! I'll look into implementing that.
philjohnson 35 minutes ago [-]
I made a first version of it if you want to check it out! It's under the "markup" tab
Yes, yesterday's post got marked as duplicate because I didn't reference the previous post from last year. I got permission from the HN moderator tomhow to repost it again with the reference to last year's post.
Rendered at 18:19:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background.
If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious.
Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately.
I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again.
I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.
Geniac ad sample (imgbb.com)
[0] https://i.ibb.co/67zpBDgh/OIP-2472099845.jpg