# A lawyer in Manhattan gets a 500-page contract. Every clause needs to be sear...
Canonical: https://social-archive.org/yena/1O6rGlVzFl
Original URL: https://x.com/heynavtoor/status/2069773963413340297
Author: Nav Toor
Platform: x
## Content
A lawyer in Manhattan gets a 500-page contract. Every clause needs to be searchable. By hand: one week. An accountant in Chicago gets 200 scanned invoices. Every number needs to land in a spreadsheet. By hand: four days. A researcher at Stanford has 50 academic papers. Tables, formulas, charts locked inside PDFs. By hand: two weeks. Every one of them is losing days of their life to copy-paste. Now meet MinerU. A free and open source tool that reads any PDF, Word doc, PowerPoint, Excel sheet, or scanned image. It pulls out the text in reading order. Tables become clean HTML. Equations become LaTeX. Handwriting handled. 109 languages. You give it a 200-page PDF. You get clean Markdown back in 90 seconds. What makes it different from every other PDF tool: - Multi-column layouts. It reads top to bottom within each column. Not left to right across the page. Like a human reads. - Scanned documents. OCR built in. Point it at a photo of a printed page from 1995. Get clean text back. - Math formulas. LaTeX-quality recognition. Every equation renders correctly. - Tables. Merged cells, multi-row headers, tables that span three pages. All preserved. - Ten-thousand-page documents. Sliding window processing. No manual splitting. - Batch mode. Point it at a folder of 500 documents. Walk away. Three ways to use it: - CLI. One command per document. - Python SDK. Five lines of code. - Web app at http://mineru.net. Upload, click, download. No install. Plugs into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, LangChain, LlamaIndex, RAGFlow, Dify, and FastGPT. Feed extracted documents straight to your AI agent. The story: The OpenDataLab team at Shanghai AI Laboratory needed to extract clean text from millions of scientific documents to train a language model. Existing tools failed. They built their own. Then they open sourced it. 68,551 stars. MinerU Open Source License, built on Apache 2.0. Free for personal and commercial use. Three technical reports on arXiv. Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $239.88 a year. It still loses your tables. ABBYY FineReader Corporate charges $165 a year. It still cannot do equations. Mistral OCR charges $2 per 1,000 pages. Your bill never stops. MinerU costs $0. Runs on your laptop. Your documents never leave your machine. Here is the wild part. The lawyer got her contract back in 4 minutes. Every clause searchable. The accountant fed 200 invoices in. Every number landed in a spreadsheet in 12 minutes. The researcher fed his 50 papers in. He wrote his literature review on a Sunday afternoon. The document your company has been processing by hand for years takes MinerU minutes. Your documents become text. Your text becomes data. Your data becomes answers. The week you used to lose to paperwork is back in your hands.