Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
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Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#2Love it: a wonderful gift to millions of students, analysts, journalists, researchers, and others who for many years have had to extract data from PDFs via throwaway scripts, copy-and-paste, or (yikes) read-and-retype.
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#3This is just awesome! Well done!
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#4If they automate table detection, then many low-end "analysts" will be made redundant. PDFs one of the worst bits for data feed automation.
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#5Great work, the integration (as shown in the demo) and UX are really well done. A couple of questions:
1) Why use Python for OpenCV when Ruby has a decent wrapper that can do Hough (https://github.com/ruby-opencv/ruby-opencv)? Or was the Ruby version just too buggy still?
2) Is there a command-line version planned? I guess it'd be most relevant once auto-detection is figured out.
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#6If they automate table detection, then many low-end "analysts" will be made redundant. PDFs one of the worst bits for data feed automation.
In fact, we’re working on an auto-detection feature at this very moment! :D
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#7If they automate table detection, then many low-end "analysts" will be made redundant. PDFs one of the worst bits for data feed automation.
Yeah, I did this for a living for a little while--I was an analyst whose job was mostly to read industry quarterly reports in PDF form and condense them into much smaller reports to give to upper management.
Of course, the data itself is usually also for sale. But a manager would rather make an analyst scrape it from the PDF report than pay the reporting company extra for a data subscription, because they prefer to bear the opportunity cost of not having the analyst work on something more important and productive.
As an analyst, I can't count how many times I asked my former employer to shell out a couple hundred dollars a month for market intelligence data subscriptions and was blown off because they didn't want to allocate a budget for it.
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#8Tabula is also the name of a programmable logic company doing fpga-like "3PLDs" where the design implemented varies over time to increase effective size of the logic fabric. (tabula.com)
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#9Awesome - have needed this so often.
Re: Introducing Tabula, a human-friendly PDF-to-CSV data extractor
#10Great work, the integration (as shown in the demo) and UX are really well done. A couple of questions: 1) Why use Python for OpenCV when Ruby has a decent wrapper that can do Hough ( https://github.com/ruby-opencv/ruby-opencv )? Or was the Ruby version just too buggy still? 2) Is there a command-line version planned? I guess it'd be most relevant once auto-detection is figured out.
1) We’re not actually using Python for OpenCV, just ruby-opencv and possibly some bindings in Java/JRuby. (I think Python’s in the build instructions due to a numpy dependency in OpenCV. Though that might be specific to using Homebrew on OS X. Definitely looking into it soon.)
2) No plans at the moment, though that's an awesome idea.