4 posts tagged with "Docling"

The Statement Processor reads PDF bank and credit card statements, extracts every transaction, and groups them by vendor. It's finished and on GitHub under an MIT license. Building it surfaced a problem worth writing down: even on a clean, digitally-generated PDF straight from the bank, the table extraction sometimes dropped a row, usually the last one in a transaction table. A sum check that compares the extracted transactions against the total the statement already prints on itself is what made the output trustworthy.

Docling already does most of what a batch text-extraction harness does: it iterates over documents, swaps OCR backends, handles per-document errors, and exports structured output. So the code worth writing for the soviet.recipes project is a thin pipeline around Docling that adds the three things Docling leaves to me: image preprocessing before extraction, a neutral slot for engines Docling does not wrap, and consistent scoring across every approach I test. So far I've built the engine slot and the batch loop that drives it; preprocessing and scoring are designed but not written yet.

Docling with the EasyOCR engine extracted the Cyrillic text and page structure from a scanned Soviet cookbook, but it dropped text where the pages curved away from the camera. That data loss makes this configuration insufficient on its own for the soviet.recipes project. I tested four sample pages configured for Russian and English, using Kiro.dev to write the script.

Phase 1 of the soviet.recipes project is done: every page of the cookbook is now captured as a set of 224 high-resolution DSLR images. Now I'm planning how to turn those images into machine-readable text.