Writing on AI systems, cloud & infra
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Kevin Tan

Cloud Architecture · AI Engineering · Distributed Systems

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How I Fixed Vertical Japanese PDF Extraction

The text layer is already there. It just comes out top-to-bottom, right-to-left, and in the wrong order. The fix is geometry.

A Tokyo street at night lined with vertical Japanese neon signs, columns of characters running top to bottom, standing for the column order a tategaki extractor must reconstruct.

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