[HN Gopher] Show HN: Browser-based PDF form fields detection (YO...
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Show HN: Browser-based PDF form fields detection (YOLO-based)
Hey HN! Last week, Joe Barrow released CommonForms [1], a set of
open models for automatically detecting form fields in PDFs. He
trained two models, FFDNet-S and FFDNet-L, on a dataset of 55k
documents. You can read more about his approach in the arXiv paper
[2]. As someone who's been searching for reliable models to auto-
detect form fields (one of the last hard problems in PDF form
filling), I was seriously impressed by the quality of these models.
I wanted to give them the attention and distribution they deserve,
so I created a fully browser-based implementation that handles both
detection and field addition. My implementation relies on his
models and onnx runtime web + some post-processing. I plan on
publishing a small browser library to encapsulate it in the coming
days to make it easier to deploy anywhere (currently you'd have to
fork / copy my code) Happy to answer any questions about the
browser-based implementation! Questions about the models
themselves should be directed to Joe, who I believe is also on HN
[3] [1] https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms [2]
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506 [3]
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jbarrow
Author : nip
Score : 15 points
Date : 2025-10-19 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commonforms.simplepdf.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (commonforms.simplepdf.com)
| jbarrow wrote:
| Hey, Benjamin, thanks for the attribution! Happy to field any
| questions HN users have.
|
| It's really gratifying to see people building on the work, and I
| love that it's possible to do browser-side/on-device.
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