11–20 of 32 posts
I still don't understand how PDF could become one of the standards for publishing documents. Well structured content gets converted into PDF which loses most of that structure. And then a lot of work is done to guess that structure from PDF and convert it back to a better file format. It just shows that successful solutions don't have to be technically good.
Very interesting! I had never heard of Apache PDFBox before, I must give it a try. I have a similar program that parses horse racing PDFs from sites such as www.racehorserunner.com - which are of a much simpler format, but cause endless problems for me when the PDFs have layout problems. For example, issues like one column being too long and overlapping with another, e.g the last race on http://www.racehorserunner.co…
Edit: Looks like it's on the second page of results and I never made it that far, heh. Goes to show how biasing the first page of results is.
I still don't understand how PDF could become one of the standards for publishing documents. Well structured content gets converted into PDF which loses most of that structure. And then a lot of work is done to guess that structure from PDF and convert it back to a better file format. It just shows that successful solutions don't have to be technically good.
Sadly I think that often the publishers actually want it that way, i.e. the they do not want the data to be easily parsable...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly I think that often the publishers actually want it that way, i.e. the they do not want the data to be easily parsable...
I think it's more that they want consistency in rendering across devices and media.
[1] https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/tree/master/src...
I still don't understand how PDF could become one of the standards for publishing documents. Well structured content gets converted into PDF which loses most of that structure. And then a lot of work is done to guess that structure from PDF and convert it back to a better file format. It just shows that successful solutions don't have to be technically good.
(Its PostScript origins may also explain the bizarre mix of text and binary that constitute the file format. For example, page contents are in a relatively free-form PostScript-ish RPN-like textual language, but are found in "content streams" which may be compressed or encoded into a binary format. Data "object" structures include things like 'Then there are things like the cross-reference table of all objects in the file, which is an array of fixed-width textual numbers representing file offsets, e.g. "0000001056 00000 n" refers to something 1056 bytes from the start of the file. Reactions of WTF!? from those working with the format for the first time are not uncommon.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
PDF is used primarily for pre-paginated media and does not reflow text; if the PDF author wanted the pages in landscape orientation, or using some other paper dimensions, he would have specified that. Same goes for margins and the like.
Doesn't mean the author isn't wrong for my reading situation... Or isn't doing it just cause everyone else is.
Anyone who has tried selecting text from a two-column PDF page will also quickly realise the nature of the problem.
Impressive! Seems like you can't just use PDFBox out of the box (no pun intended) and need to write some custom code specific to the PDF itself per the chart-parser commits[1] [1] https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/tree/master/src...