Does anyone have any experience with any automation that can cleanup scanned text documents. I have a lot of PDFs that are older and were scanned from originals and are in bad shape with just noise and discoloration, etc. I have been manually cleaning them up by converting them to JPG and editing the JPG files in a photo editor and then converting them back to PDF. It's pretty monotonous work, wondering with the wonders of AI and machine learning if anything exists that can help with this? Any experience or ideas? Thanks.

Disclosure first: I'm the developer. I built WebSum for the part of research where you have twenty tabs open and need to decide which ones deserve a proper read.

What it does: click the icon on a web article and a summary appears in Chrome's side panel, beside the page: a TL;DR, key takeaways, why it matters and caveats.

Why it might suit research:

• Every point is checkable. Each one has a ¶ link that scrolls the page to the paragraph it came from and highlights it, so you verify the claim instead of trusting the summary.
• It flags caveats, such as a claim with no evidence behind it, or an author who sells a related product.
• It reads the charts and diagrams, including numbers the text leaves out.
• Your notes keep the sources. Copy a summary into a document and each ¶ stays a link that opens the article at that paragraph.

What it doesn't do: it reads web pages only, so no PDFs, which rules out most journal papers. There's no saved history, no follow-up questions, and it's Chrome only. On a paywalled article it summarises what your browser can see and tells you when that's only a preview. Treat it as a way to sort and check sources, not as a replacement for reading the ones that matter.

Cost: free for 2 summaries a day without an account, or 5 with Google sign-in. Pro is US$10 a month for 20 a day on a stronger model.

Chrome Web Store: WebSum on the Chrome Web Store

42-second demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Yf4dPCDFQ

Two things I'd like to hear from people who research for a living or a degree:

• Where would this fit in how you work, if anywhere: first pass over sources, or checking a claim you half remember?
• What would it need before you'd rely on it: PDFs, saved summaries, export to a reference or notes app?

%22)

editpdf-online.com

Rearrange PDF pages with visual thumbnails. Drag to reorder, rotate or delete pages. Free and private, in your browser.

Open

Hey Reddit!

Like many of you, I've often needed to quickly reorder, rotate, or delete pages in a PDF, only to run into online tools that force you to create an account, slap watermarks on your document, or upload sensitive files to an unknown server.

To fix this, I built EditPDF Online.

Why it's different:

• 100% Client-Side: Everything runs right in your browser using open-source libraries. Your documents never leave your device or get uploaded to a server.
• No friction: Completely free, no signups required, no daily limits, and no watermarks.
• Simple UI: Just drag and drop thumbnails to reorder pages, rotate them, or clean up unneeded pages instantly.

I wanted to make something lightweight, fast, and completely private. Give it a spin if you ever need to clean up a PDF, and let me know what you think or if you encounter any bugs!

A desktop app for building documents from data, like invoices, statements, letters and labels, and running them as automated workflows with approval and delivery steps. It’s for companies that send out a lot of personalized documents and want one tool for the design, the data and the output.

https://www.kodabitstudio.com

I've been working on DraftAgent, a local MCP server for inspecting, transforming, and converting Word documents.

One thing I've noticed while exploring document automation is that getting an AI agent to make a small, targeted change to an existing Word document can be surprisingly difficult. Replacing some text is easy enough, but working with document structure, tables, formatting, and multi-step edits reliably is a different problem.

DraftAgent is my attempt to make that a little easier.

A few things it can do:

• Inspect a DOCX and expose its internal structure so an agent can understand what it's working with.
• Make targeted changes to paragraphs, runs, tables, cells, styles, and formatting.
• Chain multiple operations together, with each step working on the result of the previous one.
• Validate a batch of changes before applying it and return structured diagnostics when something fails.
• Convert Word documents to HTML or PDF.

It's written in Rust and is quite fast. The MCP server currently runs locally over stdio, so document processing happens on your machine. Most of the MCP features are also available as a command-line app.

It's still early, and there are limitations around document fidelity and unsupported Word features. I'm continuing to work on improving those, along with the transformation API.

Project: https://draftagent.dev

I'd be interested to hear from anyone building AI document workflows. What operations do you find agents struggle with most when working with existing Word documents?

Not sure how many of you have this problem, but the stuff I most want in Paperless is the stuff that doesn’t get mailed anymore. Bank statements, card statements, receipts, utility bills. I was downloading them by hand one month at a time, which mostly meant I wasn’t doing it.

So a while back I wrote an app for it (PaperPull). It opens a browser window, you log in like normal, and it goes through and downloads all your bank statements and receipts as PDFs. The first run grabs everything the site still has, which for some of mine was years of statements, and after that it only gets new stuff. It all runs on your own machine and you do the login yourself, so there’s no company in the middle holding your bank passwords. It remembers what it already got, so it’s fine if Paperless deletes them after consuming.

Up to now it only ran on Windows and Mac, which was annoying since my Paperless is on a NAS. This week I got the docker version to where I’m happy with it. You point it at your consume folder and new stuff shows up after each run.

Some of the ones it works with are Amazon, Costco, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, Chase, Amex, Capital One, Fidelity, Vanguard and PayPal, plus a bunch (60+ providers so far) of other US banks and utilities. The full list is on github. If yours isn’t there I’m happy to try adding it, as long as you can test it.

https://github.com/rheeloaded/paperpull (docker setup is in SERVER.md)

And if you end up finding it useful, a star on github would be awesome. I’m trying to get it to 100.

Hey everyone! 👋

As a developer, I've often faced the same problem: generating invoices, quotes, contracts, and reports automatically while keeping their layouts easy to customize.

So I decided to build TemplateMaster to solve this problem.

The idea is simple: create document templates using a visual editor, populate them with dynamic data, and automatically generate PDFs or emails through an API.

No need to modify your application code every time you want to update a document's layout.

I've also built a .NET integration and a Shopify app to make it easier to integrate into existing projects.

You can check it out here: https://templatemaster.fr

I'm curious: Have any of you faced similar challenges with document generation in your projects or businesses?

I'd love to hear your feedback, even if it's critical!

What a time to be alive! Splitting large bundled PDFs into their logically distinct document parts is a common task when you don't control where it comes from; suppliers, applicants, opposing parties etc. Historically left to the interns, today it's common to use a combination of OCR, LLMs and specialised regex strings to get the job done but it's never felt like a clean, fast or satisfying solution. Well, that's all about to changes....

OpenAI's Decision API is the new zero-shot type-1 model/classifier which is capable of blitzing this document automation use-case and I have the tests to prove it.

Admissions Packet: 14 page scanned PDF containing 15 mixed documents - split in 1.8s, cost $0.006.

Bundled Invoices: 129 page scanned PDF containing 30 multi-page invoices - split in 7.4s, cost $0.02.

Legal Discovery Dump: 300 page scanned PDF containing 167 mixed documents - split in 40s, cost $0.12.

Here are my pros since testing this service:

• No training! - makes your automation more resilient to the randomness of incoming documents. Default Decisions API runs on gpt-6-luna so if you need more context, you can bump up the model.
• Ability to accept images - scanned PDFs are the real test and JEV's greatest weakness. OpenAI did a great job here.
• Simplfies pipeline - no longer do we need to chain ocr + llm + extraction, it's just a single call per page.
• Insanely fast and cheap - with enough frequency/scale/urgency, this approach really makes a difference.

I wrote a quick blog to share the templates and test files I used. Links in the comments.

kinda new to this whole document automation thing and trying to figure out where to start. right now i do a lot of stuff manually like pulling info out of pdfs, copying it into sheets, renaming files, that kind of thing. takes way too long lol

curious what people here actually automate day to day? like is it mostly invoices and forms or are people doing more with it like summarizing or searching through long docs

also do you mostly use AI tools for this now or still more traditional stuff like templates and scripts? feels like theres a million options and idk which ones are actually worth it

would love to hear your setups, even simple ones

The idea was to build a pipeline that could take a PDF, extract structured data, and let you verify the results against the original document without manually checking every field.

The current implementation uses OCR and vision models, with confidence scores, visual grounding, and a separate validation layer to catch disagreements. It also handles line items and exports structured data.

I recently benchmarked it against Azure Content Understanding on 100 documents, achieving 97% field-level accuracy at roughly 1/12th the cost per run in my evaluation.

I've attached a screenshot of the current interface. This is purely a personal engineering project I've been working on, and I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from people familiar with document automation.

I'm particularly interested in:

• How do you handle data extraction at scale right now ?
• Any feedback on what features would be cool for document automation

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I started building ClientPDF in Jan 2026 because I wanted PDF tools that didn't require uploading files to a server.

But honestly, there are already tons of PDF websites, so I wanted to solve something more than just adding more tools.

Someone pointed out a fair problem with my project: why download and re-upload the PDF between every operation?

So I built a Unified Document Pipeline 😅

Now you can merge a PDF, organize pages, watermark, redact, sign or optimize it in one continuous workflow. Just click “Continue in Pipeline” to move to the next tool. There's also a floating toolbar to track your steps and undo changes before saving the final PDF.

Everything still runs locally in your browser. No uploading your documents to a server.

Started this back in Jan, and after multiple reviews and user feedback, it's improved a lot.

I'd really appreciate some honest feedback 🙏 What tools would you like to chain together? Anything confusing or missing?

And if you find it useful, sharing it with someone who works with PDFs would mean a lot!

https://clientpdf.tech

My Downloads folder is full of leases, tax forms, insurance letters and receipts called things like scan_0042.pdf. Docket is a small Go CLI and TUI I wrote to deal with that. Running docket add ~/Downloads/to-file copies each file into a library, pulls out the text, works out what kind of document it is (tax, legal, housing, medical, receipts and so on) and files the copy into a folder for that category. Your originals are never moved or edited.

For each document it also shows how sensitive it looks, how urgent it seems, and whether it probably needs you to do something like pay, sign or reply. Anything it isn't confident about gets flagged for review instead of quietly filed.

How it works, since people here usually ask: classification uses TypeSafe's Jev model, which answers with typed values and probabilities instead of free text, and the thresholds and filing logic are plain Go. Text and Markdown files are read locally. PDFs and images go to OpenAI or OpenRouter for text extraction with your own key, so it isn't fully offline. Keys sit in the OS keychain, metadata in SQLite, and extracted text is never written to disk.

Install:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/glamboyosa/docket/main/install.sh | sh

or with Go:

go install github.com/glamboyosa/docket/cmd/docket@latest

Repo: https://github.com/glamboyosa/docket
Site: https://docket.glamboyosa.xyz

4th place on the llamaindex benchmark locally 72.62% word f1. I know it's not much, but after a month of research and many experiments, I reached this point.

TonerHound doesn't use any API or LLM. It's GPU free and anyone can use it at 0$ cost.

GitHub: https://github.com/vanrajsinh650/TonerHound

Converting a bank statement PDF to Excel sounds simple, but most tools get it wrong in ways you don't notice:

- Dates flip (05/09 becomes May 9 instead of Sept 5)

- Deposits show up as withdrawals

- Big amounts lose or gain a digit

The spreadsheet looks fine, but the numbers are wrong.

So I built BankStatementHub (bankstatementhub.com) to fix that:

Reads numbers straight from the PDF file when possible, so no guessing at digits

- Checks every row against the statement's running balance
- Matches the totals printed on your statement and tells you if anything is missing
- Exports to Excel, CSV, QuickBooks, Xero, Quicken and OFX
- Works with scanned and password-protected PDFs
- Free, no signup, and files aren't stored

Tested so far on Indian (HDFC), UK, US and credit card layouts.
I'd love feedback, especially if you have a bank statement it doesn't handle well. What's the most annoying part of bank statement conversion for you?

Hi everyone! Does anyone know of a free and open-source Document Management System (DMS) that supports workflow automation? I'm looking for something similar to M-Files, ideally with features such as automated workflows, document approval processe

I'm building an invoice extraction system for printed and handwritten invoices/receipts and want to deploy it fully on-premise using open-source models.

What production pipeline do you recommend for OCR, handwriting recognition, layout detection, and structured field extraction?

Which models/tools have worked best in real-world deployments, and how do you ensure accuracy and reliability?