2 items tagged “pdfs”
2024
unstructured. Relatively new but impressively capable Python library (Apache 2 licensed) for extracting information from unstructured documents, such as PDFs, images, Word documents and many other formats.
I got some good initial results against a PDF by running “pip install ’unstructured[pdf]’” and then using the “unstructured.partition.pdf.partition_pdf(filename)” function.
There are a lot of moving parts under the hood: pytesseract, OpenCV, various PDF libraries, even an ONNX model—but it installed cleanly for me on macOS and worked out of the box. # 2nd February 2024, 2:47 am
2009
No PDFs! The Sunlight Foundation point out that PDFs are a terrible way of implementing “more transparent government” due to their general lack of structure. At the Guardian (and I’m sure at other newspapers) we waste an absurd amount of time manually extracting data from PDF files and turning it in to something more useful. Even CSV is significantly more useful for many types of information. # 1st November 2009, 12:04 pm