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A comment on Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly.

Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by mgm__ on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @03:35AM (#26326029)
I created a PDF table extractor tool last year with the same idea that it should be local only. Try it here: https://pdftableutil.possiblenull.com/app/ Also as a Google Docs addon (still local only) https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/pdf_table_impor...

I had a bad case of scope creep, so the tool can also extract tables from scanned/image PDFs using OpenCV.js and tesseract OCR wasm build!

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Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by kickbeak on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:22AM (#26329470)
Wow That looks awesome, what did you use to display the PDF in the Browser? feels all really responsive!
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Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by mgm__ on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:26AM (#26329536)
I used Mozilla's PDF.js https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/ It is what firefox uses on desktop to show PDFs!
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Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by kickbeak on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @10:34AM (#26329671)
Thanks, really great work!
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Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by redman25 on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @04:40AM (#26326401)
This is interesting. How accurate would you say it is?
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Re:Local PDF Tools – Powered by WebAssembly by mgm__ on Wednesday March 03, 2021 @05:22AM (#26326672)
I haven't seen anything better. It started as a PoC and I decided not to include table detection on the page and require the user to draw box around the table.

I use Tabula under the hood for the cell/row detection and it is really good given the correct mode is selected for the type of table. The modes are stream (find cells by spacing) or lattice (find cells by ruling lines).

The OCR/OpenCV seemed to be fine as well as long as the text isn't too blurry. Here is a GIF of the OCR/OpenCV running on an example Image PDF: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-OobUBBtnydg/X6Vn_Ls3juI/A...

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