Last year, my boss gave me a task that looked simple enough at first glance - get data on how many vacation days each employee has in total, how many they have used in the current year, and how many they have left, and put that data in our SharePoint server (so people can see when filling out a vacation request if they actually have enough days left).
Most of that was fairly easy, except that the POS program that sits in the actual data only allows exporting data in one single format - PDF. Converting that PDF file to a CSV that I can feed into SharePoint was one of the nastiest things I did last year. I did manage to get it to work though, by toying around with pdftotext for a while and exploring its command line parameters.
It was a pleasure to use! It took me a while to discover the correct set of command line parameters I needed, but I got it to work! Thanks, xpdf!
Had several somewhat similar experiences in my career. I think the general public would be surprised at the amount of duct tape and chewing gum that's behind things that appear to be important processes.
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Also available for windows and mac at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
Last year, my boss gave me a task that looked simple enough at first glance - get data on how many vacation days each employee has in total, how many they have used in the current year, and how many they have left, and put that data in our SharePoint server (so people can see when filling out a vacation request if they actually have enough days left).
Most of that was fairly easy, except that the POS program that sits in the actual data only allows exporting data in one single format - PDF. Converting that PDF file to a CSV that I can feed into SharePoint was one of the nastiest things I did last year. I did manage to get it to work though, by toying around with pdftotext for a while and exploring its command line parameters.
It was a pleasure to use! It took me a while to discover the correct set of command line parameters I needed, but I got it to work! Thanks, xpdf!
Had several somewhat similar experiences in my career. I think the general public would be surprised at the amount of duct tape and chewing gum that's behind things that appear to be important processes.