← Back to context

Comment by andrewlu0

3 hours ago

nice - did you write a custom parser for PDF/DOCX? we wrote one for XLSX after running into event loop issues with sheet JS

Using lopdf[1] for PDF parsing, rtf-parser[2] for RTF, calamine[3] for XLSX, and I'm sure you know that DOCX/PPTX/etc. is basically just a zip file of XML + text. The LLM cares about textual data (which just gets moderately cleaned up post-extraction), so I (thankfully) didn't have to deal with rendering. But showing a preview or end-result to a user would be a huge plus, so I can see myself using your library.

[1] https://github.com/J-F-Liu/lopdf

[2] https://github.com/d0rianb/rtf-parser

[3] https://github.com/tafia/calamine

  • What about rendering? That's the hard part.

    • we built a library @extend-ai/react-xlsx on top of it that renders the parsed contents onto a canvas

      testing was mostly manual with a test corpus we generated. its not perfect but its pretty close for most files we've seen

    • Did you actually read the thread or are you just commenting randomly? I explained why I didn't have to deal with rendering by my count twice.

      1 reply →