commonforms

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 for

Training ML models for PDF forms. You can try out what I’ve got so far with this service that automatically detects where fields should go and makes PDFs fillable: https://detect.semanticdocs.org/ Code and models are at: https://github.com/jbarrow/commonforms That’s built on a dataset and paper I wrote called CommonForms, where I scraped CommonCrawl for hundreds of thousands of fillable form pages and used that as a training set: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16506 Next step is training and releasing some DETRs, which I think will drive quality even higher. But the ultimate end goal is working on automatic form accessibility.