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PDF to Text, a challenging problem

(www.marginalia.nu)
357 points ingve | 4 comments | 13 May 25 15:01 UTC | HN request time: 0.676s | source
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90s_dev ◴[13 May 25 18:18 UTC] No.43975996[source]▶
Have any of you ever thought to yourself, this is new and interesting, and then vaguely remembered that you spent months or years becoming an expert at it earlier in life but entirely forgot it? And in fact large chunks of the very interesting things you've done just completely flew out of your mind long ago, to the point where you feel absolutely new at life, like you've accomplished relatively nothing, until something like this jars you out of that forgetfulness?

I definitely vaguely remember doing some incredibly cool things with PDFs and OCR about 6 or 7 years ago. Some project comes to mind... google tells me it was "tesseract" and that sounds familiar.

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hallman76 ◴[14 May 25 02:32 UTC] No.43980118[source]▶
We will never get back the collective man-decades of time that has been burned by this format. When will the madness stop?
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theamk ◴[14 May 25 02:54 UTC] No.43980258[source]▶
When we get an alternative that can:

(1) be stored in a single file

(2) Allow tables, images and anything else that can be shown on a piece paper

(3) Won't have animation, fold-out text, or anything that cannot be be shown on a piece of paper

(4) won't require Javascript or access to external sites

that means never.. We've got lucky we at least got PDF before "web designers" made (3) impossible, and marketers made (4) impossible

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1. numpad0 ◴[14 May 25 07:09 UTC] No.43981712[source]▶
(-1) be vector format that never gets pixelated

(0) that reproduce everywhere on any OS perfectly

(0.5) that supports (everything) any typographical engineers ever wanted past and future

Bitmap formats are out from clause -1, Office file formats disqualify from clause 0, Markdown doesn't satisfy clause 0.5. Otherwise a Word .doc format covers most of clauses 1-4.

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2. Timwi ◴[14 May 25 07:52 UTC] No.43982024[source]▶
> (0) that reproduce everywhere on any OS perfectly

Can somebody explain why this isn't the case for HTML? I'm frequently in a situation where a website that mimics printed pages fails to render the same between Firefox and Chrome. I wish to understand the primary culprit here. I thought all of the CSS units are completely defined?

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3. djxfade ◴[14 May 25 10:07 UTC] No.43982761[source]▶
Probably due to different font rendering in the OS.
4. scajanus ◴[14 May 25 12:12 UTC] No.43983569[source]▶
I think this is the result of 1) it being a moving target and 2) HTML and CSS being a de facto standard rather than de jure, where the (differing) implementations define at least part of the spec.

You also can't really embed fonts in a HTML file, you rely on linking instead -- and those can rot. Apparently there has been some work towards it (base64 encoded), but support may vary. And you need to embed the whole font, I don't think you can do character subsets easily.