Category
Engineering
7 articles from the nctools team.
Engineering
Tesseract language packs — trade-offs and how to pick one
Fast, best, or original? A pragmatic guide to Tesseract's three model families and when each one earns its cost.
Engineering
Batch conversion patterns without a backend
How we let users convert 500 PDFs in one drop without ever leaving the browser tab.
Engineering
Why we chose TanStack Start over Next.js
The unglamorous engineering decision that shaped every subsequent product decision — and why we would make it again.
Engineering
PDF to Excel — heuristics for table detection in the wild
PDFs describe positions, not tables. Turning that into rows and columns is an ancient computer-science problem. Here is how we approach it.
Engineering
Building a zero-upload SaaS: architecture notes
How we structure a product where 90 percent of user activity never touches our server, and what that means for our monitoring, billing and support.
Engineering
Client-side PDF extraction with pdfjs-dist: a deep dive
Mozilla's pdfjs-dist library powers every PDF reader on the web. Here is what it does well, where the sharp edges are, and how we build on top of it.
Engineering
OCR in the browser: how Tesseract.js and WebAssembly changed everything
A deep look at running the world's most-used open-source OCR engine at 200+ MB of trained models directly in a user's tab.