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Posted by Jerry Stuckle on 09/23/07 03:18
C. wrote:
> On 22 Sep, 23:39, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>> Shelly wrote:
>>> Here is a situation that I have to think out for a potential customer.
>>> Currently he receives about 150 emails a day with pdf attachments for
>>> orders. The format of the pdfs are all the same. Now he has to:
>>
>> Why is it coming in in a PDF? I would think this would be the place to
>> make the change - into something that's easily machine readable.
>>
>> I suppose you could extract info from a pdf - I've never tried it, but
>> don't see why it wouldn't be possible. But it will be much harder.
>>
>
> One good reason is that PDF's are written in Postscript - which is a
> programming language rather a data structure. Unless all the PDFs come
> out of the same bit of software, there's no guarantee that what
> appears at a particular place on screen will always be in the same
> place in the code. Even if it is in the same place, it might be
> encoded directly as a glyph or a font table reference rather than as
> recognizable characters.
>
> I'd suggest that the OP look to see if the data can be captured in a
> machine readable form (even if that is embeded within a human readable
> format) and if not - walk away.
>
> C.
>
PDF's are not written in postscript.
--
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Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstucklex@attglobal.net
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