PDF Footnotes Processor
Automated footnotes and reference mapping for academic documents with Excel export.
- Role: Developer
- Timeline: December 2023
- Team: Solo Project
- Technologies: OpenCV, OCR, PDF Processing, Streamlit
- Link: https://pdf-proceappr-app-jxybczrguea2egjbmrk6yh.streamlit.app/
Problem
Academic researchers spend hours manually extracting and organizing footnotes from PDF documents. Matching footnote numbers to their references across pages is tedious and error-prone.
Solution
Built a tool that uses OCR and layout analysis to detect footnote regions, extract text, match footnote numbers to references, and export as a structured Excel spreadsheet with page numbers.
Impact
- 90% time savings on footnote extraction
- Accurate footnote-reference matching
- Structured Excel output
- Works with scanned PDFs
Key features
- PDF text extraction with layout preservation
- Footnote region detection using CV
- Footnote number-reference matching
- Multi-page reference tracking
- Excel export with formatting
- Scanned PDF support via OCR
- Batch processing capability
- Preview before export
Tech stack
- Frontend: Streamlit
- Backend: Python, PyMuPDF, pdfplumber
- Cv: OpenCV, Tesseract OCR
- Export: openpyxl, pandas
What K Laxman learned
- PDF layout analysis techniques
- Combining rule-based and ML approaches
- Handling diverse PDF formats
- Building academic research tools
Explore more
- Home — overview, skills and a built-in AI assistant
- Experience — roles at Think360 AI (CAMS), CAMS Mutual Funds and IIT Delhi
- Projects — GenAI, LLM, RAG and full-stack builds
- Education — IIT Delhi, M.Tech & B.Tech Computer Science
- GitHub Activity — open-source contributions
- Contact / Hire me