Posted by Shelly on 09/23/07 11:12

The pdf are ALL the same. They come from the corporate website and the
customer has NO control over that it is a pdf. The customer does not
currently have a website of his own. I could also do this job as a
standalone application on his computer, but was wondering if he could do
double duty by having his own website.

Shelly

P.S. It's nice to see we're still talking, Jerry.


"C." <colin.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1190516388.977848.29540@y42g2000hsy.googlegroups.com...
> 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.
>

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