Re: Copy PDF

We had a customer on IBM i who would only send us PDF's. We could see the
query name in the PDF!. We begged, they wouldn't budge.

Our customer service had to read the PDF and type the results into another
application. It was worth the money for me to read the text from the
PDF.. What a giant pain!

I had to look for certain characters in the string returned to figure out I
was on a detail line. I think it finally took me about a week to process
the report into a database file that we could use to insert into the other
system.

Art


On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 11:49 AM John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Tue, Sep 11, 2018 at 11:15 AM (WalzCraft) Jerry Forss
<JForss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Working on that approach [receiving data in something other than PDF] as

well.

Working with PDF's as the starting point vs the result is a new thing

for me.

I'm with Brad: Virtually anything you can get other than PDF is going
to be better than PDF.

You *shouldn't* have experience with PDFs as the "starting point"
(i.e. data source) because it's a horrible, horrible format for that
purpose. It's designed entirely for producing output.

How easy and how accurate it is to extract data from a PDF depends a
lot on how the PDF was made. This is regardless of programming
language or operating system or third-party tools or whatever. The
worst-case scenario is that the PDF is little more than a graphic
image of an optically scanned (or even photographed!) document. Then
the parsing will involve OCR, if possible at all.

If the PDF was made programmatically, with actual character data
rather than image data, then you have a fighting chance; but by the
same token, whatever programmatic process created that PDF should also
be able to create something else, ANYTHING else, from whatever it was
using as input.

John Y.
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