2009/6/18 Francis Davey <[email protected]>: > 2009/6/18 Tom Steinberg <[email protected]>: >> >> Clearly this is very interesting! >> >> The question is, how do relatively non-technical people use this site >> to help upload the details? > > Yes. My thoughts were something like a wikispreadsheet or something > similar because you don't have to write a user interface bespoke but > can pull data in as needed (and have some way of dealing with history) > but I'm sure other means will work. > > Lots of people who are non-technical can enter data, so even if I only > did one invoice a day and you got a bunch of others, you'd slowly get > there. That would give you most of the data you need. > > The tricky bit is the original invoice/claim. I don't think you can > auto extract these (correct me if I'm wrong) and most non-techies will > baulk at having to extract certain pages from a PDF and then upload > them. This is something you might be able to automate or assist with.
I've just run Simon Hughes' expenses through a PDF image extract utility and each page seems to be one image. If you ask the users to match claims to page numbers in the PDF then it should be easy to grab the invoice. Alternatively, you could just extract all the PDF images to .pngs first and present them on the website, and ask users to click on the invoices and claim forms relevant to their entry. Phil PS I was wondering if the images and black boxes were stored separately and if we could sneakily decensor them, but the boxes do appear to be part of the image. Nice to see computer literacy for once. -- "I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone." --Bjarne Stroustrup _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
