Show HN: An API to extract texts from images and PDF files (opens in new tab)

What's the benefit to using this over `pdftotext` and/or `pdfimages | convert | tesseract`?

http://www.stamplin.com/api/ returns 403 when clicking on the API docs after confirming an account via email link

I come bearing gifts, if anyone would like to host some of this themselves.

This follows the API documented by Stampin (minus the throttling errors)--it does not currently do the OCR, but as mentioned elsewhere by zdw you can probably get tesseract to get you like 80% of the way there. If you wanted to use that, you'd likely just replace the hacky `pdftotext` callout with your preferred toolchain.

You'll need Ruby, Sinatra, and the Xpdf tools, I believe.

Dual-licensed under the AGPL, BSD, and WTFPL licenses. idklol.

The code:

  require 'sinatra'
  require 'json'

  use Rack::Logger

  post '/extracttext' do

      begin
      status 204 and return unless params["file"] != nil

      type = params["type"] || "text"
      lang = params["lang"] || "en"

      tmpfilename = params["file"][:tempfile].path
      `pdftotext #{tmpfilename}`
      File.delete(tmpfilename)

      convfile = File.open("#{tmpfilename}.txt","r")
      lines = convfile.read.split("\n")
      convfile.close
      File.delete(convfile.path)

      content_type "application/json"
      {"text"=>lines}.to_json

      rescue
          status 500 and return
      end
  end

EDIT:

For God's sake run this in a jail and only on an internal network!

I like the concept and it is a good start. Pulling text from PDFs is especially painful. I think the output format needs improvement. It is just a large array of strings. It seems like the strings are sometimes a single line, and sometimes not. My particular use case is extracting raw data from a PDF. I would like to see more structure to the output. For example, knowing where new lines, tabs, etc are located would be very helpful for parsing raw data.

Here is the PDF I used to test: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

Is there a technical reason for the 1-2MB limit or is it arbitrary?

The OCR is really useless. I tested it with some reddit "advice animal" memes (because there is a need for transcriptions). You would think that text is pretty simple and easy, but the output I got was like:

    /\n\nnmrs wn\ufb02qyi mm mm\nTlIIEI\ufb02|\ufb02llllM\u2018l co

The upgrade button doesn't work, and nobody is going to hover long enough to see the "Not Available Yet" title. And the current 10 requests isn't even enough to test with.

I'm excited to try this.. so figure out a way to take my money soon.

This looks nice except for having to depend on your servers as a middle man.

Any chance you could release the code as Free or open source so that its users can use it standalone on their own machines?

Why would someone want to use an API instead of a library?

Can I assume API keys are on the roadmap? I don't particularly like using my username and password.

Nice. Are you using the Tessaract OCR lib at the core of the extraction?

Any custom requests? Let us *know.

Any Feedback Welcomed