PDF Tools - ComfyUI Custom Node Package

Advanced PDF processing, OCR, and AI vision analysis nodes for ComfyUI.

📢 Important Notice: Package Split

The download functionality has moved to a separate package:

• PDF Tools (this package): PDF extraction, OCR, AI vision processing
• Download Tools (new package): gallery-dl and yt-dlp downloaders

If you need media download nodes, install the download-tools package separately:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/download-tools
.\install.ps1

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🎉 Quick Start

Installation

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes/PDF_tools
.\install.ps1

Verify Installation

.\check_install.ps1

Start Using

1. Restart ComfyUI
2. Look for nodes under categories: PDF, OCR, Vision, Layout
3. Start processing documents!

📦 Available Nodes

PDF Extraction

• PDF Extractor v08/v09 - Advanced image extraction with quality assessment

  • Automatic spread detection for scanned books
  • Image quality scoring (sharpness, contrast, brightness)
  • Duplicate detection
  • Organize output by quality
  • JSON metadata export

• Simple PDF Extractor - Basic extraction without advanced features

OCR (Optical Character Recognition)

• Surya OCR Layout Node - State-of-the-art multilingual OCR

  • 90+ languages supported
  • Layout-aware text extraction
  • High accuracy on complex documents
  • GPU-accelerated inference

• Surya Layout OCR Hybrid - Combined layout analysis + OCR

  • Single-step document processing
  • Preserves reading order
  • Handles multi-column layouts

• PaddleOCR VL Remote - Specialized for Chinese/CJK documents

  • Excellent for Asian language texts
  • Remote processing capabilities
  • Requires separate virtual environment (see PaddleOCR_VL_SETUP.md)
  • Runs as standalone service due to CUDA version conflicts

Layout Analysis

• Enhanced Layout Parser v06 - Advanced document understanding

  • Detects titles, paragraphs, tables, figures, lists
  • Hierarchical structure extraction
  • Reading order detection
  • Bounding box coordinates

• LayoutLMv3 Node - Microsoft's document AI model

  • Multi-modal document understanding
  • Form and receipt processing
  • Table structure recognition

AI Vision & Object Detection

• Florence2 Rectangle Detector - Microsoft Florence-2 vision model

  • Object detection with bounding boxes
  • Image captioning (simple & detailed)
  • Visual question answering
  • OCR and text detection
  • Region-specific descriptions

• Florence2 Cropper Node - Crop based on detections

  • Automatic image region extraction
  • Batch processing of detected objects

🚀 Key Features

✅ Smart PDF Extraction - Quality scoring, spread detection, duplicate removal
✅ Multilingual OCR - 90+ languages with Surya, Chinese/Japanese with PaddleOCR
✅ Layout Understanding - Detect document structure (titles, paragraphs, tables)
✅ AI Vision Models - Florence-2 for object detection and image analysis
✅ Batch Processing - Process multiple documents efficiently
✅ GPU Acceleration - Fast inference with CUDA support
✅ Quality Assessment - Automatic image quality evaluation
✅ JSON Export - Structured metadata for all extractions

💡 Usage Examples

Extract High-Quality Images from PDF

Node: PDF Extractor v08
├── Input PDF: "mybook.pdf"
├── Output Folder: "./extracted_images"
├── Options:
│   ├── ✓ quality_assessment (score each image)
│   ├── ✓ spread_detection (detect 2-page spreads)
│   ├── ✓ organize_by_quality (high/medium/low folders)
│   └── ✓ save_json_output (metadata file)
└── Result: Images sorted by quality with detailed metrics

OCR a Scanned Document

Node: Surya OCR Layout Node
├── Input: "scanned_page.png"
├── Languages: ["en"] or ["en", "es", "fr"]
├── Output:
│   ├── Extracted text with 95%+ accuracy
│   ├── Bounding boxes for each word/line
│   └── Layout information (columns, paragraphs)

Detect Objects in Images

Node: Florence2 Rectangle Detector
├── Input Image: "photo.jpg"
├── Task: <OD> (Object Detection)
├── Output:
│   ├── Bounding boxes for detected objects
│   ├── Labels (e.g., "person", "car", "dog")
│   └── Confidence scores

Analyze Document Layout

Node: Enhanced Layout Parser v06
├── Input: PDF page or image
├── Output:
│   ├── Regions: title, text, table, figure, list
│   ├── Bounding box coordinates
│   ├── Hierarchical structure
│   └── Reading order

🔧 System Requirements

• OS: Windows 10/11 (primary), Linux compatible
• Python: 3.10+ (included with ComfyUI)
• GPU: NVIDIA with CUDA recommended (CPU works but slower)
• RAM: 8GB minimum, 16GB+ recommended for AI models
• Storage: 5-10GB for packages + models

📚 Documentation

Main Guides

• INSTALLATION_GUIDE.md - Detailed setup instructions
• CODE_OVERVIEW.md - Understand the codebase structure
• LICENSE.md - Licensing terms and conditions
• CREDITS.md - Third-party libraries and acknowledgments

Additional Docs

• SURYA_OCR_NODE_GUIDE.md - Surya OCR detailed guide
• PaddleOCR_VL_SETUP.md - PaddleOCR separate environment setup
• PDF_LAYER_DETECTION_GUIDE.md - PDF layer analysis
• BATCH_PROCESSING_GUIDE.md - Batch workflow tips

🔧 Core Dependencies

Auto-installed with install.ps1:

• PyMuPDF (fitz) - PDF processing and rendering
• Pillow - Image processing and manipulation
• numpy - Array operations and numerical computing
• opencv-python - Computer vision operations
• transformers - Hugging Face AI models
• torch - PyTorch for deep learning
• surya-ocr - Advanced OCR engine
• paddleocr - Chinese/multilingual OCR (basic version)
• layoutparser - Document layout analysis

Note: PaddleOCR VL requires a separate virtual environment due to CUDA version conflicts. See PaddleOCR_VL_SETUP.md for setup instructions.

See requirements.txt for complete list.

📁 Project Structure

PDF_tools/
├── nodes/              # ComfyUI node implementations
│   ├── pdf_extractor_v08.py      # Advanced PDF extraction
│   ├── surya_ocr_layout_node.py  # Surya OCR
│   ├── eric-florence2-cropper-node.py  # Florence-2 vision
│   └── enhanced_layout_parser_v06.py   # Layout analysis
├── florence2_scripts/  # Florence-2 AI vision models
├── sam2_scripts/       # SAM2 segmentation models
├── tools/              # Utility scripts
├── Docs/               # Comprehensive documentation
└── __init__.py         # Node registration

🐛 Troubleshooting

"Module not found" errors

Run the check script: .\check_install.ps1

"CUDA out of memory"

• Close other GPU applications
• Process fewer pages at once
• Use CPU mode (slower but works)

OCR accuracy issues

• Ensure image is high resolution (300+ DPI)
• Check language settings match document
• Try different OCR nodes for comparison

PDF extraction produces no images

• Verify PDF contains raster images (not just text)
• Check PDF isn't encrypted or password-protected
• Try Simple PDF Extractor for troubleshooting

See INSTALLATION_GUIDE.md for more troubleshooting.

🎯 Best Practices

1. High-Quality Inputs - Use 300+ DPI scans for best OCR results
2. Enable Quality Assessment - Let the tool filter low-quality extractions
3. Batch Process - Process multiple documents in one workflow
4. Export Metadata - Save JSON outputs for downstream processing
5. GPU Acceleration - Use CUDA for 10x faster inference with AI models

📝 Version Info

Current versions:

• PyMuPDF: 1.26.4+
• Transformers: 4.55.0+
• Torch: 2.7.1+cu128
• Surya-OCR: Latest from GitHub
• Florence-2: Microsoft Research

📄 License

Copyright (c) 2025 Eric Hiss. All rights reserved.

Dual-licensed:

• Non-Commercial Use: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0)
• Commercial Use: Requires separate license - contact [email protected]

Important: This project uses third-party libraries with various licenses (GPL, AGPL, MIT, Apache). See CREDITS.md for complete dependency licensing.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for:

• Code style guidelines
• Testing requirements
• Pull request process
• Development setup

👥 Contact & Support

• Author: Eric Hiss
• GitHub: EricRollei
• Email: [email protected], [email protected]
• Issues: Open an issue on GitHub for bugs or feature requests

🙏 Acknowledgments

Special thanks to:

• ComfyUI community for the amazing extensible platform
• Microsoft Research for Florence-2 vision models
• Vikp for Surya OCR
• Meta AI for SAM2 segmentation models
• Hugging Face for model hosting and transformers library
• All open-source developers whose work makes this possible

See CREDITS.md for detailed acknowledgments.

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Ready to process documents! Install dependencies, restart ComfyUI, and start extracting.