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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

i really need this tool like these concepts

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

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