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Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

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Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#21

Post by coulix »

cozzyd wrote: post #13
logicallee wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you really want to rake it in, serve, at static speeds (meaning instantly, I swear, boot a ramdrive (Tmpfs) and serve static html from nginx all from RAM), text versions of the top 10,000 web sites. there is so much crap on most sites. re-crawl hourly. monetize via Google adwords. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I am not suggesting serving PDF's. I am suggesting serving tiny text renders of top sites,…

You can use the SHA-1 of the PDF's to avoid serving the same pdf twice.

SHA-256 ;)

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#22

Post by 2_listerine_pls »

WalterGR wrote: post #18

Fairly frequently, OCR engines are posted here. But almost without exception, they lack layout analysis, which renders them largely useless. Is this something that could be combined with those OCR engines? (e.g. TesseractOCR...)

some services allow you to set the layout manually: Docparser

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#25

Post by yeldarb »

logicallee wrote: post #11
jlink wrote: post #2

who would be interested by an online website doing the job?

if you really want to rake it in, serve, at static speeds (meaning instantly, I swear, boot a ramdrive (Tmpfs) and serve static html from nginx all from RAM), text versions of the top 10,000 web sites. there is so much crap on most sites. re-crawl hourly. monetize via Google adwords. EDIT: I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. I am not suggesting serving PDF's. I am suggesting serving tiny text renders of top sites,…

Sounds cool and all but two huge problems:

1) Copyright: completely re-serving the complete content of the top 100 sites with your own ads does not fall under fair use and would almost certainly be a magnet for lawsuits.

2) Distribution: how do you find your niche of people with poor internet connections and get them to use your mirror instead of whatever site it is they want to read?

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#26

Post by dmoo »

tyingq wrote: post #7

Curious if this works better than the pdftotext utility that comes in the Debian poppler-utils package. That has a --layout option that works really well sometimes and really terrible other times. Doesn't seem to be related to document complexity either.

Also available for windows and mac at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#27

Post by scrollaway »

nemild wrote: post #16

For those interested in converting PDF tables into CSV, there's also Tabula ( http://tabula.technology/ ) (Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)

I find it absolutely ridiculous that we have to resort to these kinds of tools :/

We have digital formats, and we decided to standardize document distribution on the one that makes it as hard to extract data as if it were on physical paper.

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#28

Post by zatkin »

rsync wrote: post #10

This is important for (al)pine users ... when reading email in a terminal it is very useful to be able to open a PDF attachment as text and view it in the (terminal) mailtool ... Yes, (al)pine is my mailtool in 2017.

No need to feel ashamed. I set up my own email server in 2016 and use mutt, squirrelmail, and iOS Mail very frequently.

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#29

Post by shakna »

rsync wrote: post #10

This is important for (al)pine users ... when reading email in a terminal it is very useful to be able to open a PDF attachment as text and view it in the (terminal) mailtool ... Yes, (al)pine is my mailtool in 2017.

I use alpine in 2017.

It's easy to use, pluggable, and faster than any GUI I've touched.

Re: Show HN: PDFLayoutTextStripper – Converts PDF to text while keeping the layout

#30

Post by eumm »

nemild wrote: post #16

For those interested in converting PDF tables into CSV, there's also Tabula ( http://tabula.technology/ ) (Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)

Tabula is the nice free tool but requires technical background to run it. There is a free https://pdf.co with both online and offline tools (Windows) for PDF to CSV. (disclaimer: i work on it)
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