PDF text extraction?

[Richard Gaskin]

Richmond wrote:

 > On 2.04.2016 18:38, Richard Gaskin wrote:
 >> Thanks. Yes, Mark Lucas has been doing some outstanding work on
 >> SuperCard 4.8.
 >
 > Well, outstanding is as outstanding does, I really wonder how
 > Supercard keeps going in the face of competition of Livecode.
 > I know that Supercard has been around for donkey's ages (recall
 > playing with it [and finding it rather awkward compared with
 > Hypercard 2.4.1] about 20 years ago), but as Macintosh, whichever
 > way one looks at things, is a coterie, niche market, a multiplatform
 > alternative (pace Livecode) would seem to make it redundant.

One could equally ask about LiveCode in the face of competition from the 
nearly-ubiquitous Python.  There are so many languages in the world 
because each offers something a little different from the others.

Given the similarities between LC and SC, it might seem at first glance 
like they do the same thing, and in some respects they do.

But when you spend more time with them, it becomes clear that the 
similarities between them are like the similarities between Mac and 
Windows:  both have overlapping windows and many other nearly identical 
GUI elements, but Mac is built by a company that also makes the hardware 
so they're able to exercise a bit more control over the experience, one 
which its fans feel is more integrated and satisfying.

Similarly, SuperCard has 1/7th of the job that LC has: OS X vs OS X, 
Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, Linux/ARM, and faceless Server.  Not 
surprisingly, focused exclusively on 1/7th of the platform coverage, 
Mark Lucas has been able to integrate with OS X more smoothly in some 
ways than LC can.

SuperCard is a glove wrapped around the hand of OS X, while LC is more 
of a platform-independent VM, interfacing with the host OSes in such a 
broad range of ways that it has to use more internal code for things SC 
can depend on OS X for.

They look similar because both do a good job, but under the hood their 
architectures are vastly different, each comprised of good choices but 
different because they serve very different goals.


 > In a perfect world (which is a silly turn of phrase) Livecode would
 > be able to parse just about any file one could chuck at it.

That's the world I hope we're moving toward.  And format by format we'll 
get there.

Right now most data scientists use Python as their glue language to 
wrangle Hadoop, R, and the other parts of their workflow.  There's 
really no reason they couldn't be using LiveCode in that role, and it 
becomes a compellingly self-evident choice once we can move some of that 
workflow directly into the language through automated handling of more 
formats.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com