robinhowlett

This looks excellent - i've been looking for a timeline-based, simple-entry tool like this. Well done.

Thanks for the links - agree about the (x,y,text) callout but other metadata like font size can be useful too.

Regexes have limitations but I was able them to leverage them sufficiently for PDFs from a single source.

I parsed over 1 million PDFs that had a fairly complex layout using Apache PDFBox and wrote about it here: https://www.robinhowlett.com/blog/2019/11/29/parsing-structu...

Disclaimer: written by CEO of my company

It's funny how this area seems to attract titles like this. I used the same for my blog post, "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About SSL (but Were Afraid to Ask)"

http://www.robinhowlett.com/blog/2016/01/05/everything-you-e...

Disclaimer: I write blog posts to figure out if I understand something correctly and appreciate any and all feedback, negative or positive.

It's a question I've asked myself too. I've also wondered how often others are being aggressively pursued by former colleagues to join them at another company. I've seen team strongly believe they hire strong candidates only, but rarely seem to pursue these same people after moving to a new company.

This comment resonates more than any other. I absolutely agree with it. A complete demarcation in my life's focus and goals before getting married and, especially, having children.

I got into a similar pickle recently and did some press about it: http://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/getting-from-cease-and-...

I'm also working on a Chrome Extension that modifies the functionality of a website, but this is giving me second thoughts.

Nice looking client. I've been tipping away at a JavaFX application of late. I'm shipping with a JVM and bundling into .app/.exe distributions. Looking forward to seeing what you did to learn from it.

Yes I encountered similar issues but many of them were able to be solved.

With PDFBox I was able to deal with the content at a very low level (on a per-character basis), so that when for instance building a String, I would insert a pipe character when the distance between adjacent characters was greater than the width of the space character and then detect that when translating to a certain field.

See the convertToText() method for an example: https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/blob/master/src...

and https://github.com/robinhowlett/chart-parser/blob/f8d651e9a1... for when I used this technique

Author here; well, PDFBox is good for simple text stripping. If I wanted to print all the text on the PDF, that would be very straightforward and not much code. However, the PDF chart here is in essence a representation of structured data. I wanted to get the content in that format so that I could both serialize to JSON plus have an SDK to boot.

A web endpoint. So think of an HTTP endpoint where the request body gets turned into the input data and the query parameters become available to be used/mapped anywhere in the pipeline. It makes the integrations pretty dynamic.

[0] Kind of. It's a filter, so "false" means "do not advance". We have different Snaps for If-Else (the Snap would have 2+ outputs and you would route to a respective "branch" of the pipeline)

[1] They denote different categories - parallelogram = READ (i.e fetch data from somewhere), square = Transform (modify existing data)

[2] For Each Issue - for each object in the specific, targeted array of incoming JSON object... (basically split the array chosen)

[3] Correct

[4] You can adjust the rotation of each output, so it could snake around. You also can drag the output of one to the input of another that are not side-by-side and it will mark them as connected, so you have layout in any way. Finally, you could split up into separate pipelines and use another Snap to tie them together.

I don't think you are being harsh - I'm not sure there is any way for a visual programming language to be both powerful enough to permit massive customizations and concise enough to be immediately readable. Some level of interpretation has to be done.

I work for SnapLogic (an enterprise visual integration product) - the "free canvas" works great for us with live preview of results/data; here's an example linking a third-party code review tool's webhooks with JIRA: https://i.imgur.com/gNr1gGD.png

All of our integrations can be converted into a API with a click of a button too.

Well done

I used to use UpShot, a OS X plugin that saved by screenshots to my Public Dropbox folder and copied the public link to the clipboard. It was super useful for referencing images in code reviews, wikis etc.

Anyone recommend a better alternative?

Nice. I recently got very familiar with PDFBox and parsing complex layouts - it is a great library.

Integration platform as a service (iPaas) that can work with streaming, batch, and Big Data using a drag-n-drop UI e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfEuG7Dg_O8

Check out my company, SnapLogic: https://www.snaplogic.com/