Thanks.
The paying option would be coming if there is some interests in it.
If there is people interested in it, please let us know in this thread or at info@stamplin.com.
1. Why return an array of texts? Where do the texts get split up? At page boundaries? Column boundaries? At the end of each line? If a line is interrupted by a corner of an image and continues a couple of inches afterward, does it get treated as a separate text? (I once used a PDF->text extractor program that spit out every word sepearately, often in an incorrect order. That probably had to do with how the PDF was organized internally.)
2. "The PDF file should be smaller than 1 Mbit" -> You mean 1 megabyte, right? Because 1 megabit is only 125-128 kilobytes.
Since a lot of PDFs are badly organized (and I wonder if some programs deliberately do that to make text extraction difficult), perhaps you could try to analyze the location of each token on the page and merge the ones that seem to belong together. That would be already 100x better than most of the free PDF->text converters out there.
we are already close to do that but with a really slow parser (this one can even replace some text on the pdf). Our problem now is to understand if developers would rather have better text extraction or some other features like image extractions, etc..
Let us know what you would prefer.
I've recently been working on extracting text from PDFs myself. I've found that `pdftohtml -xml` from the Poppler utils does a decent job of it, and includes a bounding box for each piece of text. I've submitted a few patches to their Bugzilla to also include the transformation matrix as well as some extra styling information.
For OCR, `pdfimages` (also from xpdf), combined with ImageMagick's `convert`, and `tesseract` (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) works passably well.
Isn't a better solution to get software that supports PDF natively like Acrobat, then edit the documents there instead of doing a (poor) translation to Word.
I am writing something similar for a client. He needs data in tables extracted from the PDF.
Which language are you using?
I wrote two scripts, one using python and pdftotext and another using ruby pdf-reader, the ruby one gives each line of the PDF one by one which is good for extraction.
I googled "converting PDF to text" and "converting PDF to html". A tons of services already exist out there. Apparently, it's not something new. How do you plan to compete? Are you planning to focus on data extraction rather than conversion?
the initial plan wasn't about text extraction but text modification. We noticed we already have something to "give" and created this service. Following the lean methodology, we hope we are going to get some insights about the next step.
Why not just system(pdf2html) - I don't see the point since this level of functionality is trivially achieved. If it did something over and above that it might be useful, like OCR, but even that's not hard to add.
indeed, at the moment, that's quite simple. The only benefit is the fact is quite easy to integrate and fast. More advance feature should be coming soon.
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[ 3066 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadIf so, nice work!
What if the document contains sensitive or privileged data?
1. Why return an array of texts? Where do the texts get split up? At page boundaries? Column boundaries? At the end of each line? If a line is interrupted by a corner of an image and continues a couple of inches afterward, does it get treated as a separate text? (I once used a PDF->text extractor program that spit out every word sepearately, often in an incorrect order. That probably had to do with how the PDF was organized internally.)
2. "The PDF file should be smaller than 1 Mbit" -> You mean 1 megabyte, right? Because 1 megabit is only 125-128 kilobytes.
2. You're right, I mean Megabyte
Since a lot of PDFs are badly organized (and I wonder if some programs deliberately do that to make text extraction difficult), perhaps you could try to analyze the location of each token on the page and merge the ones that seem to belong together. That would be already 100x better than most of the free PDF->text converters out there.
`pdftext`, from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
For OCR, `pdfimages` (also from xpdf), combined with ImageMagick's `convert`, and `tesseract` (http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/) works passably well.