Ignoring Images When Converting from PDF to MD

[sallahbaksh]

Question

Is there a way to ignore images when converting from PDF to Markdown? If a PDF contains many images, the conversion process becomes very slow, sometimes taking over an hour. Any guidance on optimizing this or skipping images would be greatly appreciated.

[PeterStaar-IBM]

Can you give us an example?

[sallahbaksh]

I've attached a pdf that takes over an hour to convert from pdf to md:
Whitestown-UDO-Adopted-2020-06-12_Amended-November-2023 1.pdf

[PeterStaar-IBM]

@sallahbaksh Thanks a lot, let me do some investigation, but at first glance, this looks like the model gets confused from the page furniture (left and right) and starts to interprete all as a table (making it slow).

I think that with this example, we can robustify the layout model. Let us work on that!

[cau-git]

@sallahbaksh I tried converting the sample document, and it indeed takes a long time. However, it comes out fine in the end. The reason I suspect is that the high frequency of tables causes the slow-down, since table-structure inference is expensive, and longer runtimes must be expected. You can verify if you get fast results by disabling the tables . The included images should have no effect on the speed.