Per-page
96%
Confidence score
Every page gets a confidence number. Anything below threshold is routed to human review automatically.
PDF timetable → structured Excel
Your 5,800-page PDF nightmare, into clean Excel you can trust.
195 inconsistent timetable PDFs — blurry scans, blue arrows, plane & tram symbols, color-coding and all — turned into one normalized, reviewable set of Excel workbooks. Not a one-shot human grind. A pipeline you can re-run.
195
PDFs ingested
5,800
pages normalized
1
canonical schema out
scanned · OCR path
routes_normalized.xlsx
| Route | Dep | Arr | Mode | Service |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| R42 ▸ | 06:14 | 06:31 | ⬚ tram | express |
| R42 ▸ | 06:44 | 07:01 | ⬚ tram | local |
| R42 ✈ | 07:14 | 07:39 | ✈ air | express |
| R42 ▸ | 07:46 | 08:02 | ⬚ tram | local |
conf 96%
1 cell flagged for review
The pipeline
Built for your 195-file corpus — not a generic OCR wrapper
Every PDF in your batch is laid out differently. So each page takes the right path: machine-text or scanned-image, then a timetable-aware vision model that keeps the meaning, not just the digits.
01
Ingest & auto-classify
Drop all 195 PDFs. Each page is auto-tagged machine-text vs scanned-image, so blurry scans get the OCR path and clean tables skip it. No per-file babysitting.
195 PDFs · per-page routing02
Vision-LLM extraction
A timetable-aware vision model reads each page and emits the semantics: blue arrows (continuation/direction), plane & tram symbols (mode/transfer), color-coding (service type) — as explicit columns, not lost text.
arrows · symbols · colors → columns03
Normalize to one schema
195 inconsistent layouts collapse onto one canonical schema — route, stop, dep/arr, mode, color/legend, footnote — so the output is a clean, consistent set of Excel workbooks. One-click export.
1 schema · clean .xlsx out
The part the cheap route drops
Plain OCR reads digits. It loses the meaning.
Excel Power Query was already tried — it left heavy manual cleanup. The reason these PDFs are a nightmare is that the meaning lives in arrows, symbols and colors, and naive text extraction throws all of it away.
Plain OCR / Power Query
- ✕Blue continuation arrows vanish — you can't tell which trips connect.
- ✕Plane & tram symbols drop out, so mode & transfer info is gone.
- ✕Color-coding (service type) is invisible to text extraction.
- ✕Blurry scans return garbage cells with no flag — silent errors.
- ✕Every PDF's layout breaks the last one's rules — endless manual cleanup.
TimetableExtract
- ✓Arrows become an explicit continuation column — connections preserved.
- ✓Symbols become a mode column: ✈ air ⬚ tram.
- ✓Colors become a service column: express local.
- ✓Low-confidence cells are flagged for review — never silently wrong.
- ✓One canonical schema across all 195 — consistent, every time.
Built to be trusted, not just fast
"You'll be saying you missed this, and this, and this." — so we built the answer in.
Side-by-side
1-click
Review UI
PDF page next to its extracted rows; low-confidence cells highlighted for one-click correction.
No lock-in
.xlsx
Plain Excel out
The exact "set of Excel workbooks" you asked for — open in Excel, Sheets, anywhere. You own the files.
Reusable
re-run
A tool, not a one-off
Keep it for the next batch. Future timetables re-run for near-zero marginal cost — not another grind.
Free 20-page proof first
Don't pay until you've seen it on your own pages.
Send a 20-page sample of your real PDFs. You get back the extracted Excel — with the arrow, symbol and color columns intact and every low-confidence cell flagged — before any money changes hands. If it isn't right, you owe nothing.
Run my 20-page sampleYour corpus195 PDFs · 5,800 pp
Free sample run20 pages · $0
Symbol / color columnsincluded
Per-page confidenceincluded
Review & correction UIincluded
Outputclean .xlsx set
Reusable for next batchyes
Indicative scope drawn from your r/forhire post. Exact pricing and timeline confirmed after the free sample run — when you can already see the accuracy.
See it run on your timetables before you decide.
The $20 "just run a script" framing is the wrong model — these PDFs are genuinely hard. An automated, reviewable pipeline is the right one. Reply and I'll run your 20-page sample first.
No signup · free sample · you own the Excel files · built by NorthBore