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A common and difficult problem acquiring data is extracting tables from a PDF. Previously, I described how to extract the text from a PDF with PDF.js, a PDF rendering library made by Mozilla Labs. The rendering process requires an HTML canvas object, and then draws each object (character, line, rectangle, etc) on it. The easiest way to get a list of these is to to intercept all the calls PDF.js ma

Functional Programming Patterns in Four Popular Javascript Libraries I generally find discussions of design patterns a bit dry, but in testing new Javascript libraries, I’ve stumbled across some interesting tactics. Object oriented design patterns are typical not a perfect fit to Javascript, given it’s untyped nature. The language lends itself more to powerful functional programming techniques. I

I once worked for a company that sold access to legal and financial databases (as they call it, “intelligent information“). Most court records are PDFS available through PACER, a website developed specifically to distribute court records. Meaningful database products on this dataset require building a processing pipeline that can extract and index text from the 200+ million PDFs, representing 20+