4 ms·

That this is the state of things is pretty amazing

• ur-whale 6y ago
  PDF is a shitty format. As proof, I offer: can't grep on it. Which, BTW, if it was possible, would have prevented this mess.
  • statquontrarian 6y ago
    Linux has a pdfgrep command which works pretty well (unless the PDF has images of text).
    • ur-whale 6y ago
      Unless the PDF has every letter placed by independent PostScript like commands or - worse - text has been imported from an SVG file. pdfgrep is at best probabilistic and I stand by my comment..
      • flal_ 6y ago
        Agreed. I work on a solution for extracting data from random documents ( invoices, payslips, you name it ) for natives pdf in the wild ( not scans) we gave up : and just rasterize to send to an OCR software... It's also probabilistic, but way more reliable.
    • addandsubtract 6y ago
      Spotlight can also search within PDFs
  • Aerroon 6y ago
    And yet it is the format documents are in. Government websites are full of PDFs.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]