Project Title

olmocr — Toolkit for Linearizing PDFs and Image-Based Documents for LLM Datasets/Training

Overview

olmocr is a Python-based toolkit designed to convert PDFs and other image-based document formats into clean, readable, plain text format. It stands out for its ability to handle complex formatting, equations, tables, handwriting, and multi-column layouts while maintaining a natural reading order. The toolkit is efficient and cost-effective, with a focus on performance and accuracy.

Key Features

Converts PDF, PNG, and JPEG documents into clean Markdown
Supports equations, tables, handwriting, and complex formatting
Automatically removes headers and footers
Maintains natural reading order in multi-column layouts and figures
Efficient conversion at less than $200 USD per million pages (based on a 7B parameter VLM, requiring a GPU)

Use Cases

Researchers and data scientists using large datasets for training language models
Document digitization projects requiring high accuracy and clean text output
Educational institutions digitizing textbooks and course materials

Advantages

High performance and accuracy in converting various document formats
Supports a wide range of document types and complex layouts
Cost-effective solution for large-scale document conversion
Regular updates and model improvements based on community feedback

Limitations / Considerations

Requires a GPU for efficient processing due to the 7B parameter VLM
May have limitations with extremely low-quality scans or highly stylized documents

Tesseract OCR: A more traditional OCR tool that can handle a variety of languages and document types, but may not match olmocr's performance with complex layouts and formatting.
PDFPlumber: A Python library that extracts data from PDFs, useful for simpler text extraction tasks but lacks the advanced features of olmocr.
Apache PDFBox: A Java tool for working with PDF documents, offering a range of functionalities but without the specific focus on OCR and document linearization.

Basic Information

GitHub: https://github.com/allenai/olmocr
Stars: 14,094
License: Unknown
Last Commit: 2025-09-17

📊 Project Information

Project Name: olmocr
GitHub URL: https://github.com/allenai/olmocr
Programming Language: Python
⭐ Stars: 14,094
🍴 Forks: 1,048
📅 Created: 2024-09-17
🔄 Last Updated: 2025-09-17

🏷️ Project Topics

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📚 Documentation

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This article is automatically generated by AI based on GitHub project information and README content analysis

olmocr

Project Description