Browse all technical articles on the MDisBetter blog.
Signal-to-noise ratio, microphone choice, room treatment and pre-processing: what actually moves transcription accuracy from 60% to 99% on real recordings.
TechnicalArchitecture for migrating thousands of Word documents to Markdown: audit, categorise, prioritise, convert with Pandoc, quality-check, organise and publish.
TechnicalEngineering retrospective: the architecture decisions, the failure modes we hit, the accuracy improvements that actually moved the needle.
TechnicalVoicemails, meetings and interviews sit unindexed. Convert them to Markdown, organize by date and speaker, then search with ripgrep or Obsidian in seconds.
TechnicalTurn videos into a searchable text archive: transcribe them, organize the Markdown with frontmatter metadata, then search it all with ripgrep or Obsidian.
TechnicalEnd-to-end architecture for turning web sources into a queryable AI knowledge base: conversion, chunking, embedding, vector storage and update strategy.
TechnicalStatic fetch vs headless browser, Playwright and Puppeteer mechanics, wait conditions, and cost tradeoffs behind URL-to-Markdown tools on JS-rendered SPAs.
TechnicalFrom HMM-era speech recognition to encoder-decoder transformers and Whisper's 680k-hour training set, plus why structured Markdown output matters afterward.
TechnicalA .docx file is a ZIP archive of XML. Walk through document.xml, styles.xml, and OOXML to see why naive text extraction loses heading semantics.
TechnicalA technical deep-dive into the PDF file format: content streams, glyph positioning, why extraction is lossy, and what this means for AI workflows.
TechnicalHow YouTube captions work: auto-generated ASR versus creator-uploaded tracks, why auto-captions are unreliable, and how fresh AI re-transcription compares.
TechnicalTechnical deep dive: DOM parsing, tree-walking, element-by-element conversion rules, and why naive html2text falls short on modern web pages.
TechnicalTechnical comparison of three Word-to-Markdown approaches: Mammoth.js, Pandoc, and AI-powered conversion. When to use each, with realistic tradeoff numbers.
TechnicalWe counted tokens for HTML and Markdown versions of 5 representative web pages with tiktoken. Markdown averaged 85% fewer tokens. GPT-4o cost math included.
TechnicalWhat plain-text transcripts lose and what Markdown preserves: punctuation, sections, timestamps, emphasis, and the LLM extraction quality difference.
TechnicalSRT and VTT are subtitle formats for video players, plain text is unstructured, and Markdown adds structure plus AI-readiness. When to use each format.
TechnicalThree chunking strategies for RAG pipelines: header-based, token-based, paragraph-based. When each wins, with code examples and evaluation metrics.
TechnicalMethodology and results from a 20-document benchmark measuring token usage on raw PDF vs Markdown for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. With cost implications.
TechnicalTechnical guide to integrating video into RAG: transcript to Markdown, chunk by H2/H3, embed, retrieve. Python with sentence-transformers and ChromaDB.
TechnicalA technical look at the main-content extraction problem. Mozilla Readability, Trafilatura, and LLM-based extraction compared: strengths and weaknesses.
TechnicalWord tables allow nested tables, merged cells, and multi-row headers. Markdown tables are flat rows and columns. What survives, what breaks, how to bridge it.