Show HN: Draw and extract tables from PDF reliably

Re:Show HN: Draw and extract tables from PDF reliably by saradhi on Friday April 03, 2020 @08:57AM (#22768712)

Reliably* - coming with limitations

  1. Text pdfs only 

  2. Template is needed

From what I've spoken with 50-60 paid customers for a service I maintain, the most common concerns I listen are

  1. No, We get scan pdfs as well 

  2. No, We deal with lot of customers, cannot template all

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Re:Show HN: Draw and extract tables from PDF reliably by kjhitcher on Friday April 03, 2020 @11:43AM (#22770376)

Yes, agreed that this is indeed a difficult tradeoff.

Just curious, does extracttable.com provide offline mode? It seems that quite a few people can't submit their documents to 3rd party server

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Re:Show HN: Draw and extract tables from PDF reliably by saradhi on Friday April 03, 2020 @12:05PM (#22770655)

We are far away from offline mode. May be 2-3 years later thing, if we survive till that time.

Btw, did you check OpenCV morph line detection? It will help to auto detect the evident cell/row boundaries - thus reducing human effort

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Re:Show HN: Draw and extract tables from PDF reliably by kjhitcher on Friday April 03, 2020 @12:54PM (#22771359)

I did a bit, but there are tables that simply don't have any lines. Given that human beings are just so much better at detecting tables than AI, I figured maybe the solution is to help people quickly draw the table they see, rather than tweaking algorithm -- hence this new product.

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