I find it tremendously frustrating that so many people are creating this problem for themselves.
Anything that needs to be data should be data, not images. Except for some very specific cases, you're not doing anybody any favors by outputting PDF. That format is a data black hole. It allows you to transmit very well-formatted output, but it absolutely stops you from reliably using anything in that content.
I beg you all: if it's anything that contains data, or really, if it's anything for which layout and formatting is not absolutely critical, please don't use PDF. Send data as data.
Obviously. But if we could make everyone understand, then we'd be covered.
Every few months here, we get a customer asking why we can't automatically handle purchase orders that they send us in PDF format, and every time they get the same explanation.
If we could make everyone understand, we wouldn't need computer programmers. We could just have computers talk to each other, and all their formats would be magically compatible, and the vast body of data conversion code wouldn't exist.
The problem is that computers are made for humans, and humans are often wantonly illogical. You're not going to change this, short of Skynet and the rise of the machines. So it makes sense to put up with a fair amount of coding pain to make things easier for your users. It's lucrative, at least.
Think of it as a full-employment theorem for data-miners.
I scan in all my documents as PDFs. The text, including tables, gets scanned in as text. I can copy from the document and paste it anywhere else. Spotlight and Google can index the PDFs.
The only thing I can't do easily is edit the documents, but I don't need to do that with scanned documents (e.g. tax statements).
Comments
I find it tremendously frustrating that so many people are creating this problem for themselves.
Anything that needs to be data should be data, not images. Except for some very specific cases, you're not doing anybody any favors by outputting PDF. That format is a data black hole. It allows you to transmit very well-formatted output, but it absolutely stops you from reliably using anything in that content.
I beg you all: if it's anything that contains data, or really, if it's anything for which layout and formatting is not absolutely critical, please don't use PDF. Send data as data.
99% of the time I want to OCR a document or image I am not the creator of said item.
Obviously. But if we could make everyone understand, then we'd be covered.
Every few months here, we get a customer asking why we can't automatically handle purchase orders that they send us in PDF format, and every time they get the same explanation.
If we could make everyone understand, we wouldn't need computer programmers. We could just have computers talk to each other, and all their formats would be magically compatible, and the vast body of data conversion code wouldn't exist.
The problem is that computers are made for humans, and humans are often wantonly illogical. You're not going to change this, short of Skynet and the rise of the machines. So it makes sense to put up with a fair amount of coding pain to make things easier for your users. It's lucrative, at least.
Think of it as a full-employment theorem for data-miners.
I scan in all my documents as PDFs. The text, including tables, gets scanned in as text. I can copy from the document and paste it anywhere else. Spotlight and Google can index the PDFs.
The only thing I can't do easily is edit the documents, but I don't need to do that with scanned documents (e.g. tax statements).
It's not that easy. What about fonts?
Do you care about the data, or do you care about the fonts? These don't usually coincide.
Layout often also conveys information, and makes documents easier to read. Fonts are part of that layout information, but so is spacing.