2 ms·
> a hard-to-extract format such as PDF What's hard about it? It's an open standard with libraries in every language known to man. If you use it as a dumb wra
by owenmarshall 7y ago
> a hard-to-extract format such as PDF
What's hard about it? It's an open standard with libraries in every language known to man.
If you use it as a dumb wrapper for scanned images, that's going to suck. But as a way to store and faithfully reproduce nicely typeset documents with images - ie, to make an archival copy - I don't think it can possibly be beat.
- krastanov 7y agoI think the comment was about bulk extraction of data. For instance, it is pretty difficult to do bibliographic studies if all the articles you have are provided only as PDFs (even if it is text pdf). For starters, I do not think PDFs have a notion resembling a "paragraph of text", because every symbol is placed separately with its own unique coordinates. Extracting tables of numbers from PDFs is also a pain.
- maxxxxx 7y agoExactly. I have written software for legal document search. Most of what they get is in PDF and it’s a major PITA to get data out of them. Forget about tables. Just try to extract text without some garbled characters and you will lose your mind.