Re: Puzzling PDF

From	Alister <alister.ware@ntlworld.com>
Subject	Re: Puzzling PDF
Newsgroups	comp.lang.python
References	<mailman.7056.1392559276.18130.python-list@python.org> <roy-68EFBC.10333916022014@news.panix.com>
Message-ID	<tU7Mu.3501$BM7.662@fx18.am4> (permalink)
Organization	virginmedia.com
Date	2014-02-16 18:59 +0000

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On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:33:39 -0500, Roy Smith wrote:

> In article <mailman.7056.1392559276.18130.python-list@python.org>,
>  "F.R." <anthra.norell@bluewin.ch> wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> Struggling to parse bank statements unavailable in sensible
>> data-transfer formats, I use pdftotext, which solves part of the
>> problem. The other day I encountered a strange thing, when one single
>> figure out of many erroneously converted into letters. Adobe Reader
>> displays the figure 50'000 correctly, but pdftotext makes it into
>> "SO'OOO" (The letters "S" as in Susan and "O" as in Otto). One would
>> expect such a mistake from an OCR. However, the statement is not a
>> scan,
>> but is made up of text. Because malfunctions like this put a damper on
>> the hope to ever have a reliable reader that doesn't require
>> time-consuming manual verification, I played around a bit and ended up
>> even more confused: When I lift the figure off the Adobe display (mark,
>> copy) and paste it into a Python IDLE window, it is again letters
>> (ascii 83 and 79), when on the Adobe display it shows correctly as
>> digits. How can that be?
>> 
>> Frederic
> 
> Maybe it's an intentional effort to keep people from screen-scraping
> data out of the PDFs (or perhaps trace when they do).  Is it possible
> the document includes a font where those codepoints are drawn exactly
> the same as the digits they resemble?

This seems to be the most likely explanation to me although I would like 
to know why.
Assuming these are your bank statements I would change bank

Mine are available in a variety of formats (QIF & CSV) so that they can 
be used in my own accounting programs if i desire.

I see no reason why the bank would want to prevent me accessing this data



-- 
Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.

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Puzzling PDF "F.R." <anthra.norell@bluewin.ch> - 2014-02-16 15:00 +0100
  Re: Puzzling PDF Roy Smith <roy@panix.com> - 2014-02-16 10:33 -0500
    Re: Puzzling PDF Alister <alister.ware@ntlworld.com> - 2014-02-16 18:59 +0000

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