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On a personal project, I had a good experience extracting PDF text using Tabula[1]. You specify the bounding boxes where desired data is, and it spits out the content it finds. It still hits the issues mentioned in this article (surprise spaces appearing in middle of words, etc) [1] https://tabula.technology/
So all through this I’m thinking “just OCR it and be done”, and we get to: > Why not OCR all the time? > Running OCR on a PDF scan usually takes at least an order of magnitude longer than extracting the text directly from the PDF. ... so? Google can OCR video and translate it in something that feels like real-time; what PDF processing are they doing that is so performance bound? > Difficulties with non-standard chara…
1) Do you have trillion or so dollars at your beck and call? If not, you're not Google.
> Finding an algorithm that approximates how a human...
2) ...is generally nigh impossible even for someone with Google's resources (e.g. Waymo, although when it comes to reading, it's somewhat usable). Also, look at 1)
Unless by approximate you mean toddler level. In that case:
3) The approximation is probably useless
The relatively small company I work for makes me fill out some forms by hand, because they receive them from vendors as a PDF. So I print it out, sign it, and return it to my company by hand. If someone could make a service that lets you upload a PDF that contains a form, and then let users fill out that form and e-sign it and collect the results, and then print them out all at once, it would be great. It's not a bil…
* https://www.hellosign.com/products/helloworks
* JotForm (https://www.jotform.com/help/433-How-to-Add-an-E-Signature-t...)
(I know about all these because I'm working on a PDF generation service for developers called DocSpring [1]. I'm also working on e-signature support [2], but that's still under development, and still won't be a perfect fit for your use-case.)
When in doubt, use plain text. It's a million times better in every way that counts.
I wish my bank statements and such could be downloaded as plain text files, instead of massive PDF files that embed another copy of a bunch of typefaces in each file.
So all through this I’m thinking “just OCR it and be done”, and we get to: > Why not OCR all the time? > Running OCR on a PDF scan usually takes at least an order of magnitude longer than extracting the text directly from the PDF. ... so? Google can OCR video and translate it in something that feels like real-time; what PDF processing are they doing that is so performance bound? > Difficulties with non-standard chara…
"In CS, it can be hard to explain the difference between the easy and the virtually impossible."
The relatively small company I work for makes me fill out some forms by hand, because they receive them from vendors as a PDF. So I print it out, sign it, and return it to my company by hand. If someone could make a service that lets you upload a PDF that contains a form, and then let users fill out that form and e-sign it and collect the results, and then print them out all at once, it would be great. It's not a bil…
Sorry, this is a bit off-topic regarding PDF extraction, but it distracted me greatly while reading...
I'm pretty sure the intention was A B C D (cut then wash). Not sure why the author would not use alphabet order for the recipe...
[edit] Sorry, I made it read to a colleague and he mentioned the A B C D annotations were probably not in the original document. This was not clear at all for me while reading, and if they are not included it's indeed hard to find the correct paragraph order.
The relatively small company I work for makes me fill out some forms by hand, because they receive them from vendors as a PDF. So I print it out, sign it, and return it to my company by hand. If someone could make a service that lets you upload a PDF that contains a form, and then let users fill out that form and e-sign it and collect the results, and then print them out all at once, it would be great. It's not a bil…
I use Xournal - https://sourceforge.net/projects/xournal/ It lets me type in to forms - or draw text over them if necessary. Then I paste in a scan of my signature. Then save as a PDF an email across. I've been doing this for years. Job applications, mortgages, medical questionnaires. No one has every queried it. If you're hand delivering a printed PDF, it's just going to be copy-typed by a human into a computer. No…