191–200 of 350 posts
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Are you building an app?
Building personal finance app to keep track of multiple bank accounts and investments, categorising spends, etc. Parsing statement PDFs from every bank is pretty hellish.
In the past we did purposely make it more difficult to parse our PDFs
Not the only format Adobe made overly complex. Wonderfully amusing code comment, about Adobe PSD format: https://fallenpegasus.livejournal.com/854615.html
This is why iPhone didn't initially ship with double-tap to zoom for PDF paragraphs (like it had for blocks on web pages). I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. I relayed this to my manager and the bug was punted. Edit: To add a little more…
> I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and/or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as…
PDFs are incredibly flexible. Text can be specified in a bunch of ways. Glyphs can be defined to the nth degree. Text sometimes isn’t text at all. There’s no layout engine and everything is absolutely positioned. Fonts in PDF’s are insane because they’re often subset so they only include the required glyphs and the characters are remapped back to 1, 2, 3 etc instead of usual ascii codes.
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> Currently, there is no viable alternative if you want the pros but not the cons I remember OpenXPS being much easier to work with. That might be due to cultural rather than structural differences, mind - fewer applications generate OpenXPS, so there's fewer applications to generate them in their own special snowflake ways.
This is the first time I heard of it. When I search for it I only find the Wikipedia article and 99 links to how to convert it to pdf. The problem with this is that from an average person perspective it doesn't have the pros. There is no built-in or first-party app that can open this format on Mac and Linux. More than 99% of the users only want to read or print it. It's hard to convince them to use an alternative for…
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> I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and/or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as…
What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.
- Better search engine results
- Identifying experts within a company
- Better machine translation
- Finding accounting fraud
- Automating legal processes
For context, the reason why Facebook is the most successful social network is that they're able to turn behavioral residue into content. If you can get better at taking garbage data and repackaging it into something useful, it stands to reason that there are lots of other companies the size of Facebook that can be created.
PDF is, without a doubt, one of the worst file formats ever produced and should really be destroyed with fire... That said, as long as you think of PDF as an image format it's less soul destroying to deal with.
What alternative do you propose? Postscript?
This is why iPhone didn't initially ship with double-tap to zoom for PDF paragraphs (like it had for blocks on web pages). I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. I relayed this to my manager and the bug was punted. Edit: To add a little more…
> I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and/or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as…
At least :)
I’m a contractor. One of my gigs involved writing parsers for 20-something different kinds of pdf bank statements. It’s a dark art. Once you’ve done it 20 times it becomes a lot easier. Now we simply POST a pdf to my service and it gets parsed and the data it contains gets chucked into a database. You can go extremely far with naive parsers. That is, regex combined with positionally-aware fixed-length formatting rule…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and/or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as…
What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.
PDF is de-facto standard for any invoicing, POs, quotes, etc.
If you solve the problem you can effectively programmatically deal with invoicing/payments/ large parts of ordering/dispensing. It's a no brainer to add it on to almost any financial/procurement software that deals with inter business stuff.
Any small-medium physical business can probably half their financial department if you can dependably solve this issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know because I was assigned the feature, and I went over to the PDF guy to ask how I would determine on an arbitrary PDF what was probably a "block" (paragraph), and I got a huge explanation on how hard it would be. The funny thing is that creating a universal algorithm to convert PDFs and/or HTML to plaintext is probably comparable in difficulty to building level 5 self-driving cars, and would accrue at least as…
What are the groups that would benefit most from the PDF-to-HTML conversion? Who are the customers that would drive this profit? I tried to make those sentences not sound contentious but unfortunately they do, but I am genuinely curious about this space and who is feeling the lack of this technology most.