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This is one of the hardest problems we face as a financial research platform. We have a lot of financial data in tables along with line, bar and pie charts. Com

by anonu 6y ago

This is one of the hardest problems we face as a financial research platform. We have a lot of financial data in tables along with line, bar and pie charts. Coming up with something sensible and readable is a bit harder than expected. Ultimately we have a "json to latex" converter we built but it's not great...

smt88 6y ago
We have been using PDF2XL[1] for this for years (used to be called CogniView). It's genuinely unbelievable. If the PDF isn't sufficiently structured, it has OCR that seems to "just work". You can also automate the extraction and integrate it into your pipeline. The UI is pretty old and ugly-looking, but it is one of the few apps I've used in the last 10 years that made me feel genuine delight. 1. https://pdf2xl.com https://pdf2xl.com
burmanm 6y ago
Anything wrong with XSL-FO? I know it's not the hottest thing on earth, but it works. Apache FOP is still developed and it's easy to add it to a pipeline.
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  It's a lot harder to work with than an HTML template and a CSS file.
abhinav22 6y ago
I work in financial reporting, doing very similar things to what you mentioned here. Mind dropping me an email at Ashok.khanna@hotmail.com and we could discuss further? Would love to chat to others facing similar dilemmas :)
LaundroMat 6y ago
Maybe Vega and its Figures for Papers can help? https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/tutorials/figures.html https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/tutorials/figures.html
TimTheTinker 6y ago
May I recommend Prince? https://www.princexml.com/ https://www.princexml.com/ I created a PDF exporter for a manual test tracking app using this -- render to (pretty simple) HTML, pass to the prince executable, and out comes a beautifully typeset PDF. Prince has its own rendering engine that is purpose-built for PDF rendering. It's actually very good - a lot of professional books and documents have been typeset using Prince.

by anonu 6y ago

smt88 6y ago

We have been using PDF2XL[1] for this for years (used to be called CogniView). It's genuinely unbelievable. If the PDF isn't sufficiently structured, it has OCR that seems to "just work". You can also automate the extraction and integrate it into your pipeline. The UI is pretty old and ugly-looking, but it is one of the few apps I've used in the last 10 years that made me feel genuine delight. 1. https://pdf2xl.com https://pdf2xl.com

burmanm 6y ago

Anything wrong with XSL-FO? I know it's not the hottest thing on earth, but it works. Apache FOP is still developed and it's easy to add it to a pipeline.

TimTheTinker 6y ago
It's a lot harder to work with than an HTML template and a CSS file.

abhinav22 6y ago

I work in financial reporting, doing very similar things to what you mentioned here. Mind dropping me an email at Ashok.khanna@hotmail.com and we could discuss further? Would love to chat to others facing similar dilemmas :)

LaundroMat 6y ago

Maybe Vega and its Figures for Papers can help? https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/tutorials/figures.html https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/tutorials/figures.html

TimTheTinker 6y ago

May I recommend Prince? https://www.princexml.com/ https://www.princexml.com/ I created a PDF exporter for a manual test tracking app using this -- render to (pretty simple) HTML, pass to the prince executable, and out comes a beautifully typeset PDF. Prince has its own rendering engine that is purpose-built for PDF rendering. It's actually very good - a lot of professional books and documents have been typeset using Prince.