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Well usually the pdf processing I did always assumed I had a paper of x by y cm, and a mask I d move around "make a 10 by 20 cm rectangle at position (100,200),
by xwolfi 4y ago
Well usually the pdf processing I did always assumed I had a paper of x by y cm, and a mask I d move around "make a 10 by 20 cm rectangle at position (100,200), what s in that rectangle" basically.
There's a structure, just not tag-based but position-based ? Ofc, if humans shit around and change it, you're fucked with versionning your masks, but usually they print from form templates themselves.
As I used to say to my colleagues bemoaning this inconvenient analogue bridge: "if you can read it coherently as a human, we can parse it". We have to accept that administrations communicate via geometry and not semantic, and adapt while we also try to convince them to give structured tagging a chance. But they need a critical mass of their documentation pipeline to be machine-read before they even accept to discuss it.
- 411111111111111 4y agoSo your point is that pdf is a shit format that needs a custom parser for each document type before it can be used for anything but print...? I'm really confused here, it seems we all agree that pdf is a bad format?
- kaba0 4y agoI don’t know, it seems to be a format that does its intended job just fine. What’s next, will we hate txt as that’s not a good for spreadsheets?
- xwolfi 4y agoIt's as shit a format as non-UTF strings, yet it's everywhere and we must adapt, is my point. We can adapt to scanned documents before all documents are semantically tagged, just like we have to adapt to non standard ascii extensions in non English countries, is my point.
- viraptor 4y agoAnd by "if humans shit around and change it" you mean things that regularly happen and need to be accounted for like moving the physical location to a place with the address one line longer, or getting a new partner which changes the letterhead, or adding extra information required by legal, or ...