8 ms·
Have any of you ever thought to yourself, this is new and interesting, and then vaguely remembered that you spent months or years becoming an expert at it earli
by 90s_dev 1y ago
Have any of you ever thought to yourself, this is new and interesting, and then vaguely remembered that you spent months or years becoming an expert at it earlier in life but entirely forgot it? And in fact large chunks of the very interesting things you've done just completely flew out of your mind long ago, to the point where you feel absolutely new at life, like you've accomplished relatively nothing, until something like this jars you out of that forgetfulness?
I definitely vaguely remember doing some incredibly cool things with PDFs and OCR about 6 or 7 years ago. Some project comes to mind... google tells me it was "tesseract" and that sounds familiar.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- downboots 1y agoNo different than a fire ant whose leaf got knocked over by the wind and it moved on to the next.
- korkybuchek 1y agoNot that I'm privy to your mind, but it probably was tesseract (and this is my exact experience too...although for me it was about 12 years ago).
- bazzargh 1y agoBack in... 2006ish? I got annoyed with being unable to copy text from multicolumn scientific papers on my iRex (an early ereader that was somewhat hackable) so dug a bit into why that was. Under the hood, the pdf reader used poppler, so I modified poppler to infer reading order in multicolumn documents using algorithms that tessaract's author (Thomas Breuel) had published for OCR. It was a bit of a heuristic hack; it was 20 years ago but as I recall poppler's ancient API didn't really represent text runs in a way you'd want for an accessibility API. A version of the multicolumn select made it in but it was a pain to try to persuade poppler's maintainer that subsequent suggestions to improve performance were ok - because they used slightly different heuristics so had different text selections in some circumstances. There was no 'right' answer, so wanting the results to match didn't make sense. And that's how kpdf got multicolumn select, of a sort. Using tessaract directly for this has probably made more sense for some years now.
- steeeeeve 1y agoI too went down that rabbithole. Haha. Anything around that time to get an edge in a fantasy football league. I found a bunch of historical NFL stats pdfs and it took forever to make usable data out of them.
- pimlottc 1y agoThis is life. So many times I’ve finished a project and thought to myself: “Now I am an expert at doing this. Yet I probably won’t ever do this again.” Because the next thing will completely in a different subject area and I’ll start again from the basics.
- didericis 1y agoI built an auto HQ solver with tesseract when HQ was blowing up over thanksgiving (HQ was the gameshow by the vine people with live hosts). I would take a screenshot of the app during a question, share it/send it to a little local api, do a google query for the question, see how many times each answer on the first page appeared in the results, then rank the answers by probability. Didn't work well/was a very naive way to search for answers (which is prob good/idk what kind of trouble I'd have gotten in if it let me or anyone else who used it win all the time), but it was fun to build.
- anon373839 1y agoTesseract was the best open-source OCR for a long time. But I’d argue that docTR is better now, as it’s more accurate out of the box and GPU accelerated. It implements a variety of different text detection and recognition model architectures that you can combine in a modular pipeline. And you can train or fine-tune in PyTorch or TensorFlow to get even better performance on your domain.
- TZubiri 1y agoIt's still fresh with me, 7 or 8 years ago in my 20s, perhaps you are a bit older? Otherwise wouldn't hurt to do a checkup with a physician
- 90s_dev 1y agoNo I'm just good at forgetting things, I've been practicing since I was a kid.
- LordGrignard 1y agoOH. MY. GOD. THATS SO COOL, IM STEALING THAT
- hallman76 1y agoWe will never get back the collective man-decades of time that has been burned by this format. When will the madness stop?
- theamk 1y agoWhen we get an alternative that can: (1) be stored in a single file (2) Allow tables, images and anything else that can be shown on a piece paper (3) Won't have animation, fold-out text, or anything that cannot be be shown on a piece of paper (4) won't require Javascript or access to external sites that means never.. We've got lucky we at least got PDF before "web designers" made (3) impossible, and marketers made (4) impossible
- coderatlarge 1y agodvi ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_form...
- theamk 1y ago> For a DVI file to be printed or even properly previewed, the fonts it references must be already installed. If you want alternatives, I'd choose DjVu. But it's too late now, everyone is converged on PDFs, and the alternatives are not good enough to warrant the switch.
- drfuchs 1y agoDVI isn’t suitable as you’d still have to intuit where the paragraph- and even word-breaks are; what’s body text vs. headers/footers, sidebars, captions, etc; never mind what math expression a particular jumble of characters and rules came from.
- protocolture 1y agoBehold a Bitmap. But for real, thats a pretty easy set of hurdles. Really the barrier is the psychological fallacy that PDF's are immutable.
- selcuka 1y agoA while ago someone asked me a C++ question and I said "sorry, never worked seriously with C++". Then I remembered that I wrote the client code for a private instant messenger in Borland C++ approximately 20 years ago, that was used by thousands of people. So yeah, it happens.
- 90s_dev 1y agoExactly. Every time I look at Rust, it looks foreign and unfamiliar, until I remember that I wrote Rust for a client for maybe a year straight many years ago. Then it starts to come back to me.