PDF and Image Text Extractor

What Problem It Solves

Extracting text from images or PDF documents is a common need in digital office workflows, but traditional methods often face issues like inaccurate recognition or lost formatting. Specific challenges include:

• Converting scanned documents: Accurately turning image-based text into editable formats.
• Recognizing complex content: Such as digits and mixed text in invoices or business cards, where confusion can occur.
• Preserving format: Maintaining original layout and heading levels for easy editing or analysis.

How the Skill Works

This skill addresses these problems through an automated process, with core capabilities and key steps:

Core Capabilities:
- Image Text Extraction: Uses the read_image tool for global recognition, covering titles, body text, annotations, and more. For digits, it performs a double-check: After initial global recognition, it executes a second round of localized zoom verification silently, focusing on easily confused digits (e.g., 6/8/9/0) to ensure accuracy.
- PDF Text Extraction: Extracts text via the scripts/pdf_text_extractor.py script, preserving paragraph structure and heading levels, with output in Markdown format.
- Multilingual Support: Recognizes text in Chinese, English, and other languages.

Key Steps:
1. Receive file: Obtain the uploaded image URL or PDF path.
2. Execute extraction: Based on file type, invoke the appropriate tool or script.
3. Format output: Generate structured content, optionally creating a .md file or displaying directly.

Limitations and Considerations

The skill has boundaries; note the following when using it:
- File format support: Handles images (PNG, JPG, etc.) and PDFs (both text-based and scanned), but scanned pages may not extract fully.
- Recognition accuracy: Affected by image clarity and font; the "shape-first" principle applies for digit identification, with uncertain characters marked using [?].
- Complex layout handling: Extraction may be less effective for tables, multi-column layouts, etc.
- Privacy and performance: Files are processed only in the current session and not stored; recommended file size is under 50MB to avoid performance issues.