I am not a professional programmer. I would like a simple way to extract text from pdf and save the text into Excel.
I think Uipath can extract text using OCR. But I don't think that is a very reliable way.
Can I use Uipath to do the text extraction via a more reliable way other than OCR?
Can I use Python, R or other user-friendly software to extract the text from pdf?
Thank you!
The UiPath OCR capabilities are very capable when the PDF or image being processed is of high quality. However, it performs poorly on low resolution text. If OCR is your only option on low quality quality artifacts, you'll want to use a sophisticated AI offering such as Google Cloud Vision as your OCR tool of choice. I compared UiPath vs Cloud Vision and the difference was stark.
Tagged vs Untagged PDFs
Check to see if the PDF document you are using is tagged or not. You can view this by looking at the document properties, as in this example:
Better than OCR
If your PDF is tagged, you can use the UiPath Anchor Base activity to extract name-value pairs. And you can perform a structured UiPath data scrape to extract tabular list type data. The results from these extractions will be very high quality and much easier to work with than a full page scrape or OCR.
Save to Excel
As for the need to save to Excel, UiPath has many built in features for working with Excel, spreadsheets and CSV files in general. The basic process is this:
Scrape the data
Store the scraped text in a DataTable
Create an Excel Application Scope activity
Append the DataTable to the Excel file
Here's a simple example of a UiPath Studio project that does exactly that:
As you can see from the image above, the data is scraped, the DataTable is iterated over and finally UiPath saves to Excel:
OCR is the way to go when extracting text from a PDF file.
Answering #1: Simply use the Read PDF Files activity, more infos
Answering #2: Sure there are many way to extract PDFs. You can use any technology you want. But you won't have big success without using OCR. Using UiPath is the easiest as you already have the precompiled activities that you can freely choose from.
And do not forget to play around with the different OCR tech of OCRTesseract, OCRMicrosoft and OCRGoogle.
Related
I want to create a software using visual basic which reads some text in a PDF file (name on an invoice), and then creates a folder using that name. Is this possible to do, and how would I get started on this? I have programming experience in the past.
PDFs are difficult to manipulate. To do it efficiently, you'd need some libraries that allow you to open the PDFs and extract the text from it.
I haven't used VB much, but I don't expect that there will be much support for PDFs.
You are probably better off using a language like Python, which has a lot of support for PDFs.
See for instance:
- http://www.binpress.com/tutorial/manipulating-pdfs-with-python/167
- https://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=search&term=parse+pdf&submit=search
The first link also contains a few tutorials.
We develop a WPF application that has something like a context sensitive help. The content of the help pages is currently written as word documents by external colleagues (say biologists) and then translated to xaml code by developers. This process is tedious and error prone because the biologists don't see the xaml code and the word documents can't easily be diffed and tracked in a version control system.
So we'd like to improve this process and maintain the content in a single place, in a format that
is simple to edit (preferrably with a wysiwyg editor),
is stored in a simple ascii format (for diffing / version control) and
can be included automatically as a resource in our C# application.
The solution could be a framework, an external tool or any other idea.
The format should support simple html rendering such as bold and italic, superscripts, etc and images.
I suggest to use Flow Documents:
It is a WPF technology so you will use the well known tool.
Flow documents can be edited in RichTextBox WPF control. You can access an edited flow document via RichTextBox.Document property. Then you can save it into XAML file with XamlWriter. Taking all this thibngs into account you can easily and quickly create a simple application for your external colleagues.
Finally, you can load saved XAML files into FlowDocumentReader control in order to display them. It is described here.
I'm not only sure if flow documents can be embedded in resources. If it is not possible, I think that help files can be distributed separately. It doesn't seem to be a big problem.
Alternatively instead of flow documents you can use RTF format. RichTextBox can be also used to edit this kind of documents.
I'm trying to develop a tool/web application such that it will import a PDF file and I need to select text and images available in PDF by selecting them with a mouse click and marking them as title,content and image with a button click (3 different button) where the marked contents and image will be copied to clipboard or will be pasted into a word document which is going to be a another part. So in which programming language is this possible to work with and carry on ?
I'd probably try researching pure browser-side solution using pdf.js and clipboard API.
Otherwise, you'd still need clipboard API in the browser and the server-side may actually be powered by any programming language which can be hooked into a web server and has a library to parse PDFs.
You said nothing at all about your prospective server platform but to name a few, .NET has PdfSharp which is able to read PDFs, Python has a host of tools available for it. After all, there exist a bunch of command-line utilities to extract data from PDF which can be called using any PL able to call external processes.
Note that this only appears to be a simpler solution than using pdf.js but note that unless your PDFs are really uniform (say, invoices created by some piece of software), and so you'll be able to make your PDF parser know which bits of data it has to extract and return, the parser will need to returl all the data it extracted to the client, and you'll need to somehow render it all there. May be it's exactly what you need but maybe not.
Since PDFs are really tailored for typesetting and not presenting information in a structured manner, I'd try to piggyback on an already hard-core PDF rendering solution which runs in the browser, so see above.
Currently, I have a pdf that is not searchable and I am wondering what the best process is for preparing the file for coldfusion so I can index the file.
In particular, I am wondering whether a pdf file needs to be readable before using extracttext in cfpdf to pull the text from it.
I really appreciate the advice and I hope it helps other people who are interested in indexing pdf files with coldfusion.
I was considering extracting the text with Tesseract as suggested here
Performing Optical Character Recognition on PDF's from ColdFusion using a Java or .NET Library?
but if there is a built in feature in coldfusion, I would much rather use that and I think it would be more helpful to other people to know whether coldfusion can natively handle this task.
I am looking for some good tools (free or paid, though free tool is always preferred)
for doing following operations on word doc files:
Manipulation of doc/docx/text files (like replacing some placeholders with DB values) as well as
converts doc files to .pdf
Because, I will be using this tool in my WCF service library,
So I am looking for a code library and not for a GUI based product.
Please share your experience regarding same.
Thank you!
Aspose has a decent collection of MS Office and PDF manipulation libraries.
Aspose Homepage
On the off chance that you're only looking for PDFs for viewing or archival purposes, you could also setup a PDF print driver and print your office files into a given location using Automation. You could also edit Office files through Automation although this may be tedious.
VSTO would give you access to the save as PDF from the Office applications.
Please see my answer to a related question on SO where I recommend a number of ways to convert your Word document to a format that is more easy to manipulate programmatically (using XSL-FO).