Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
docparser.com
Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#2Looks get cool, nice work.
In your FAQ it says:
There are no special requirements. There is nothing to install and you don't need any technical know-how for setting up and using >>> mailparser.io.Just pointing out a potential syntax error. Otherwise if it's meant to say mailparser better explain what that is.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#3Is this using something like
https://github.com/creatale/node-fv
on the backend, which can accommodate various not perfectly scanned forms to data, after you prepare a schema?
Or is it a more simplistic "mark hotspots" which won't work well/at all if if it is not perfectly aligned/sized with the original?
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#4The Zapier integration is why I'm going to try this one.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#5I wonder how their software works. I think there's untapped potential in adobe's postscript.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#6I wonder how their software works. I think there's untapped potential in adobe's postscript.
The file format itself has all the information required to extract text from a rectangular area. Frameworks like PDFBox and iText have supported it from a long time.
It's upto users to define what are rows and columns. In most programmatically generated PDFs, this is easy. But in manually typeset PDFs, there are lots of edge cases like variable row heights or column widths, slanted table borders, stuff like that.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#7Looks get cool, nice work. In your FAQ it says: There are no special requirements. There is nothing to install and you don't need any technical know-how for setting up and using >>> mailparser.io. Just pointing out a potential syntax error. Otherwise if it's meant to say mailparser better explain what that is.
Thanks for the heads up, I just fixed it! mailparser.io is my other product which I launched a couple of years ago. Customers kept asking for document parsing capabilities so I thought it would be a good idea to start Docparser. For the FAQ I copied some text and apparently forgot to properly proof read it :)
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#8I wonder how their software works. I think there's untapped potential in adobe's postscript.
The file format itself has all the information required to extract text from a rectangular area. Frameworks like PDFBox and iText have supported it from a long time. It's upto users to define what are rows and columns. In most programmatically generated PDFs, this is easy. But in manually typeset PDFs, there are lots of edge cases like variable row heights or column widths, slanted table borders, stuff like that.
That's right! The user defines a rectangular area and we then extract the raw text based on the position. For table extraction we use tabula.java under the hood.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#9Is this using something like https://github.com/creatale/node-fv on the backend, which can accommodate various not perfectly scanned forms to data, after you prepare a schema? Or is it a more simplistic "mark hotspots" which won't work well/at all if if it is not perfectly aligned/sized with the original?
We do position based text extraction. We add however an 'unpaper' function which tries to correct misalignments and increases the quality of the scan.
Re: Show HN: Convert PDF files into structured data
#10Tried giving this[0] a shot but even just a single page was too large for the 4MB limit.