PDF reader in VA

[Bob Nemec]

Does anyone have a PDF file reader in VA Smalltalk?

I'm looking at extracting text data from some PDF files. We do it now with VB macros, and it's a bit of a maintenance mess. The PDF reference doc seems sufficiently detailed so that I could do this myself (I've done work like that with native Excel files), but I'd rather not re-invent the wheel if the work has already been done.

Thanks for any info,
Bob Nemec

[daswartz]

Does anyone have a PDF file reader in VA Smalltalk?

I'm looking at extracting text data from some PDF files. We do it now with VB macros, and it's a bit of a maintenance mess. The PDF reference doc seems sufficiently detailed so that I could do this myself (I've done work like that with native Excel files), but I'd rather not re-invent the wheel if the work has already been done.

Bob, while I love Smalltalk and prefer it for doing almost all development, I just think I would choose one of the existing software packages which can extract text from PDFs. I think the biggest problem would be spending the day wading through the many available l packages to figure out which one fits your needs. From VAST you can call DLLs, run command line programs and invoke COM interfaces. All of these interface methods are available in various packages.

Doug Swartz

[Bob Nemec]

I agree; I was not necessary looking for a native Smalltalk solution. A wrapped DLL or an example of an invoked command would have been fine. I was just curious about what others had done.

Thanks,
Bob

[davidg]

We've got a PDF parser for VAST (and Dolphin too) which can read almost any PDF file and then you can do whatever you want with it (merging PDF files, splitting PDF documents, inserting PDF objects, inserting text, adding fonts, ...).

Send me an e-mail if you are interested.

Does anyone have a PDF file reader in VA Smalltalk?

I'm looking at extracting text data from some PDF files. We do it now with VB macros, and it's a bit of a maintenance mess. The PDF reference doc seems sufficiently detailed so that I could do this myself (I've done work like that with native Excel files), but I'd rather not re-invent the wheel if the work has already been done.

Thanks for any info,
Bob Nemec

[marten]

We've got a PDF parser for VAST (and Dolphin too) which can read almost any PDF file and then you can do whatever you want with it (merging PDF files, splitting PDF documents, inserting PDF objects, inserting text, adding fonts, ...).

Send me an e-mail if you are interested.

Any thoughts to open it as goodie or stuff like this ?

Marten

[davidg]

Any thoughts to open it as goodie or stuff like this ?

Marten

I'm not really sure I want to do this. Replying to e-mails related to OmniBase is enough for me...

Also, since all our code is portable across dialects you need a separate "dialect abstraction layer" application as a prerequisite. This also changes some base VAST stuff etc.