On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 2:28 PM, Kirk Keeter <kirkkeete= r@gmail.com> wrote:

Team,

I'm working on a project that will involve processing 15,000+ comple= x financial documents. =C2=A0They are in PDF form.

Unfortunately, the documents are not available in a non-PDF form -- so I= have to electronically scan the documents and "break them down" = into a database.

Unless the actual data you&= #39;re trying to extract from the PDF is actually inside an embedded raster= image, you don't need OCR but something that can parse the PDF file fo= rmat.

=C2=A0

I'm familiar enough with Rails, that I feel comfortable doing it wit= h the Rails framework -- but I'm not sure this is a good use of Rails.<= br>

So, rails only needs to be in= volved insofar as you need a web application to wrap or expose this functio= nality. Otherwise rails is irrelevant to "processing 15,000+ complex f= inancial documents".
=C2=A0

Ruby and Javascript are the only programming languages I know, so I'= d either need to somehow do this as a Rails project (with Ruby and javascri= pt), or as a Ruby project.

If I do it as a Ruby project (not rails), can you make recommendations a= bout the best way to go about it?<= br>

Searching came = up with the pdf-reader gem (h= ttps://github.com/yob/pdf-reader) which looks like it'd give you pl= enty of power to parse and extract the data from your PDF files. Searching = also came up with an old (unmaintained?) gem called pdf-toolkit (https://rubygems.org/gems/pdf-toolk= it) that's a wrapper around the pdftk (http://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-= pdf-toolkit/). I'd just play around in an IRB session with these to= ols, trying to parse out the data from a few representative copies of the d= ocuments in question to see what works. Then you could do some trial passes= and benchmark them, etc.

--
Kendall Gifford
zettabyte@gmail.com