FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST PDF
FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST UPDATE
FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST FREE

In our work, we find more and more companies feeling unsatisfied with existing measurement systems and looking to design a measurement strategy that aligns all of their customer-experience metrics into a unified model that operationalizes a customer-centric strategy. The irony is that companies often wind up unhappy with their own customer experience as purchasers. Insights often conflict, the way that initiatives link to value creation proves elusive, or connecting improvement ideas to top-line metrics is difficult. Beyond the upfront costs of establishing complex and costly measurement systems, many top-line metrics are hard to manage and end up focusing on the measure itself, rather than identifying the root causes of customer dissatisfaction. The lines are detected with a computer vision technique called Hough transform, as implemented in the OpenCV library.Sadly, in too many cases, these efforts swallow up substantial investment and deliver little impact with respect to improved customer experiences.

If the table contains ruling lines to separate rows, we use their position to generate the boundaries (top and bottom) of each row.

Next, we detect the boundaries of the table rows. As Jeremy points out in his fantastic blog post, “A reader can’t tell the difference, but to a computer the difference is a big pain.” We merge characters into words and add spaces-if necessary-using a set of heuristics. Making matters worse, text in PDFs usually don’t contain space characters instead, the first character of the next “word” is simply placed slightly farther to the right. Replacing it with something more efficient is on our to-do list.)Īt this point, we have a collection of single characters and their positions. (We use this XML intermediate representation for historical reasons.

FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST PDF

We get that data by running the PDF through a JRuby script that drives the Apache PDFBox Java library to generate XML output similar to this: The most relevant information that Tabula uses to recognize tables is the position ( x and y coordinates) of each individual character on the page. The goal of the PDF format is to display exactly the same way across a wide range of platforms.

Instructions are available in the README.

FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST FREE

Tabula is free software, so you can also set up your own instance.(We’ll get to the details in a bit, but the processing steps are quite computationally expensive, so providing a live, publicly usable instance of the webapp is unfortunately beyond our means at this time.) You can play with a restricted live demo here to get an idea of what Tabula can do.Tabula lets you upload a (text-based) PDF file into a simple web interface and magically pull tabular data into CSV format. Tabula is free and available under the MIT open-source license. Today we’re pleased to announce the initial public release of Tabula, a collaboration born out of these previously separate projects. During this project, ProPublica used an internally-developed command-line utility named Farrago, which utilized computer vision techniques to detect and extract data from tables in PDF files.Īt the same time, Knight-Mozilla Fellow Manuel Aristarán was working on the initial stages of a web app he called Tabula, drawing upon document analysis ideas found in academic papers by Tamir Hassan, Burcu Yildiz, et al, and Emerlinda Oro, among others.

FARRAGO FEATURE REQUEST UPDATE

Merrill recently wrote a first-hand account of some of the difficulties ProPublica encountered as they released a massive update to their Dollars for Docs interactive database. Another part: existing extraction tools, such as xpdf/ Poppler’s pdftotext, aren’t designed for data tables and aren’t exactly human-friendly. Part of the problem is that PDF is not a data format so much as an electronic paper format. As many developers and data reporters know, dealing with data tables in Adobe Acrobat PDF files is a pain in the rear (to put it lightly).

Farrago feature request