Last week, Marker, the PDF to Markdown converter, topped the Hacker News homepage for a while. As a curious student in the ML world, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to look under the hood, and learn more about how this awesome Document AI tool works.
What is Marker?
As an analogy, think of marker as an intelligent transcriber, capable of reading through complex books and scientific article PDFs and converting them to clean text-oriented markdown files. Think of it as an intelligent digitization assistant for your document digitization needs.
The official description for the tool, is a bit more technical, which is as follows:
Marker converts PDF, EPUB, and MOBI to markdown. It's 10x faster than nougat, more accurate on most documents, and has low hallucination risk.
Support for a range of PDF documents (optimized for books and scientific papers)
Removes headers/footers/other artifacts
Converts most equations to latex
Formats code blocks and tables
Support for multiple languages (although most testing is done in English). See settings.py for a language list.
Works on GPU, CPU, or MPS
Working Overview
Marker functions in roughly 6 phases, as listed below:
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