Show HN: Parsing horse racing charts with Apache PDFBox

Post by oever » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 8:58 AM UTC

jahewson wrote: post #25

maxxxxx wrote: post #10

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.

PDF has a feature called Tagged PDF, which allows the document to be annotated with a semantic structure. Almost nobody bothers to generate such PDFs, but the support is there!