On Sun, 16 Feb 2014 10:33:39 -0500, Roy Smith wrote: > In article <mailman.7056.1392559276.18130.python-l...@python.org>, > "F.R." <anthra.nor...@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. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
