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A comment on What's so hard about PDF text extraction?. Parent comment

Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by thaumasiotes on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:21AM (#22481606)
If you're using an OCR engine to understand PDFs that are nothing but a scanned image embedded in a PDF... what do you need a PDF parser for? You can always just render an image of a document and then use that.
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Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by speedplane on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:29AM (#22481631)
> If you're using an OCR engine to understand PDFs that are nothing but a scanned image embedded in a PDF... what do you need a PDF parser for?

This should be obvious, but the answer is because OCR engines are not terribly accurate. If you have a native PDF, you're far better off parsing the PDF then converting to an image and OCRing. But if OCR ever becomes perfect, then sure.

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Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by tastyminerals on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:41AM (#22481674)
For accuracy and speed. The market SOTA Abbyy is far from being accurate.
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Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by speedplane on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @01:48AM (#22481705)
> The market SOTA Abbyy is far from being accurate.

While Abbyy is likely the best, it's also incredibly expensive. Roughly on the order of $0.01/page or maybe at best a tenth of that in high volume.

For comparison, I run a bunch of OCR servers using the open source tesseract library. The machine-time on one of the major cloud providers works out to roughly $0.01 for 100-1000 pages.

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Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by bhanhfo on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @07:57AM (#22483327)
OCR.space charges only $10 for 100,000 conversions. The quality is good, but not as good as Abbyy.
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Re:What's so hard about PDF text extraction? by minerals29 on Wednesday March 04, 2020 @02:25AM (#22481843)
It is the best and this is one of the reasons why PDF extraction is hard :)
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