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0 pointsdotancohen7mo ago0 comments

How do you render into structured data, from disparate letters that are not structured?

  D10
  E1
  H0
  L2,3,9
  O4,7
  R8
  W6

I'm sure that you could look at that and figure out how to structure it. But I highly doubt that you have a general-purpose computer program that can parse that into structured data, having never encountered such a format before. Yet, that is how many real-world PDF files are composed.

0 comments

throwaway44967mo ago

It is called rendering. MuPDF, Poppler, PDFjs, and so on. The problem is that you and everyone else thinks "rendering" means bitmaps. That is not how it works.

dotancohenOP7mo ago

Then I would very much appreciate if you would enlighten me. I'm serious, I would love nothing more than for you to prove your point, teach me something, and win an internet argument. Once rendered, do any of the rendering engines have e.g. a selectable or accessible text? Poppler didn't, neither did some Java library that I tried.

For me, learning something new is very much worth losing the internet argument!

throwaway44967mo ago

I have explained the details in other comments, have a look. But you can start by looking at pdftotext from Poppler, it is ready to go for 60-70% of cases with -layout flag, with bbox-layout you get even more details.

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0 pointsdotancohen7mo ago0 comments

How do you render into structured data, from disparate letters that are not structured?

  D10
  E1
  H0
  L2,3,9
  O4,7
  R8
  W6

0 comments

throwaway44967mo ago

It is called rendering. MuPDF, Poppler, PDFjs, and so on. The problem is that you and everyone else thinks "rendering" means bitmaps. That is not how it works.

dotancohenOP7mo ago

For me, learning something new is very much worth losing the internet argument!

throwaway44967mo ago

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse