What's so hard about PDF text extraction?

So that's where Ghostscript comes in. On a schedule I have a script that picks up new PDFs in the share, runs them through Ghostscript to create a multipage TIFF, that TIFF is then given to Tesseract (as it can't handle PDFs natively) which does the OCR and outputs a nice PDF with searchable text. All very simple.

The scanning of the pages is very fast, but the scanner takes an age sending the PDFs over the network - it's ethernet port is only 100mbit/s but to be honest I just think the CPU inside the scanner is slow. It also doesn't have enough internal buffer which means you can't scan the next document until the previous one has completed being sent to the share.

If I hooked the scanner up to USB, then the PC could run the Brother software which does use OCR - but it's not automatic, all it does is display the PDF inside Paperport once the scan is complete. For bulk scanning, it's not workable.

Regarding indexing - I've started looking at Solr, and it might suit my needs. I was hoping for a visual type search system, where you could see thumbnails of the PDFs in the results.

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[1] https://www.brother.co.uk/scanners/ads-2700w

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> I don't think that's a problem in HTML. I think the problem is in your head.

This directly addresses fermienrico's complaint as being targeted at HTML. The ‘in your head’ part says that the problem is imaginary and that the person's reasoning and motivation in arriving at that connection is a mystery to me. So there are two meanings combined, both of which aren't ad hominems. The statement also deliberately invokes the words of the character of Preobrazhensky from Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, on the condition of the fresh-born Soviet Union: “The Disruption isn't in the lavatories, it's in the heads”.

Let's inspect the statement more closely. The use of the second-person ‘you’ in hypothetical constructs is ubiquitous in English, instead of a third-person ‘a man’ or ‘one’, e.g.: “When you try reading PDF on a phone, you experience unspeakable horror and loss of all hope”—this doesn't imply that the addressed correspondent is the one doing this, and in fact may be directed at multiple unknown readers or listeners.

The hyperbole of ‘you're nuts’ is, to my knowledge, also a typical feature of colloquial English language, e.g.: “You must be crazy to try reading PDF on a phone”, or “What's wrong with you, that tablet is too small to display PDF adequately”. These both don't mean that the correspondent is literally mentally damaged, but that the speaking party doesn't understand their reasoning or doesn't agree with it.

My choice of words there is rather harsh, yes. Why I needed that is, I've had this same discussion before and I repeatedly failed to extract from people the reasons why they make this inference. I tried different approaches, and now came the time of directly placing the person in the shoes of an author. Still nothing so far.

On top of all this and nitpicking further, even disregarding the above I still can't quite fit the statement in a ‘personal attack’ category: as I understand it, an ‘ad hominem’ works by carrying a belief ‘the person has some bad quality A’ over to ‘the person's opinion B hence must be wrong’. In the case of ‘you must be insane/naive to have the opinion B’ no other personal qualities are involved, and the opinion B is directly stated to be wrong. Possibly uncivil and possibly unsupported yes, personal no.

P.S. Could someone please make the ‘collapse comments’ button-link larger on phones? It's even worse on a higher-PPI display, easily taking a dozen attempts to hit it—and extensions like Stylus aren't readily available on phones, what with Firefox dumping them in Preview. Just making the link a dozen characters wide would be splendid.

There is a wide world outside of consumers of SaaS products for every little niche problem.

Sometimes they are baked in processes that still use PDF's to share information, sometimes they're old forms of any kind, sometimes even old scanned docs that are still in use but shared digitally. A lot of the businesses that carry on that way are of the mind that "if it's not broke, don't fix it" which is quite rational for their problem areas and existing knowledge base. They might be a potential market at some point for a new solution, but good luck selling them on a web-based subscription SaaS solution when a simple form has been serving their needs for 30+ years.

OP's problem of the PDF being the go-between to digital endpoints is more common than you might think.

The universality I was referring to was the wide range of possibilities for how a given form might be laid out. And old documents contain a lot of noise when they've been added to or manipulated. Look inside an old PDF form from some small-medium sized business sometime. Now imagine 1000 variations of that form one standard problem. Then multiple that by the number of potential problem areas the forms are managing.

Also like OP said—it's not sexy, but it's very real and having an intelligent PDF form reader and consumer would be a time-saver for those businesses who aren't geared to completely alter their workflow.

The tool could do anything with the extracted data. If it allowed you to connect to any of your in house services (like payroll or accounting) either with a quick config/API or a custom patch, or Google Drive, or whatever without complications like online-required and web accounts especially. No whole solution like that exists to my knowledge. At least nothing accessible to the wider market.