Convert PDF to Excel

[Steve O'Hara-Smith]

On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 11:14:41 +0100
Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:

> On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 09:04:21 +0000, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> > On Sat, 23 Jan 2021 09:40:41 +0100
> > Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> > 
> > > They contain text, so the OCR problem is out of the way.
> > > Sadly, the text is re-arranged so the optimal solution (one
> > > line in a table equals one line of text, with the columns
> > > being separated by whitespace) does not appear, instead it
> > > is the other way round: one line equals one column.
> > 
> > 	I spy a fun interview question buried in this problem -
> > flipping a text file like that efficiently is far from easy - dead easy
> > if you don't mind eating memory of course.
> 
> The lesson to learn for this potential interview question
> simply is RTFM; from "man pdftotext": -layout will try its

	Aw but where's the fun in that. There are very few interview
questions for which the right answer isn't "use the tool that already
exists" but that defeats the purpose of interview questions which is to
watch the candidate squirm^Wthink. Over the years I've picked up a couple of
gems without off the shelf or well known answers.

-- 
Steve O'Hara-Smith                          |   Directable Mirror Arrays
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