Hi there! I’m relatively new to KM and I’m looking for a way of tackling a particular usage case.
I regularly get lab test results back in a PDF (in the same format each time) and then I manually enter these results into an online form. Anyone have tips for automating this? Which tools would you use and where would you begin tackling this?
Their server is a trifle slow, so be prepared to wait 2-3 minutes.
There are installation instructions in the INSTALL file, although you might need to add a “.txt” suffix to read it (or drop it onto BBEdit or TextEdit).
Anyone wanting to convert PDFs to text should have this tool.
Xpdf is the older (original) package, Poppler is a fork of Xpdf. I had the impression that Poppler is more actively developed than Xpdf. Xpdf (3.04) is from 2014, whereas Poppler was updated March 2017.
Poppler’s pdftotext also has a couple of additional options, e.g you can set crop areas. Besides that I don’t see big differences. Poppler has a centralized library, the Xpdf tools seem to be static builds.
BTW, for convenience, Xpdf can also be installed via Homebrew ️
It depends exactly what software do you use to create those forms. Actually, some of the tools create them in such a poor way, so form's data became unrecognizable after it's filled. Last time I used this form builder https://online-form-builder.pdffiller.com/ and it worked out fine after all, yet it works so with paid version only, not with free one