I'm in a bit of a stump. Not sure how many people here are familiar with the plug-in "Fusion Pro" for Acrobat but maybe it doesn't matter.
I need to create a 2d Barcode and have it read data for 3 or more columns in excel i.e.: A, B, C, D
As said earlier, I've been creating these barcodes through fusion pro and it's called a "DataMatrix" does DataMatrix imply that the barcode is 2D or are the other different names that 2D barcodes can have?
Thank you!
ALSO: If you have a solution for this through another software please don't hesitate to mention that. I'm not bounded to just use FusionPro.
DataMatrix does imply 2D barcodes. There are several encoding strategies for DataMatrix and other 2D barcodes (QR Code and PDF417 are two highly popular ones). What you want to do is "Tab-delimit" your data, so Excel puts the fields in different columns. That means embedding the ASCII control character HT (for horizontal tab) in between your fields.
Each of the symbologies has a method for embedding control and escape characters in the data portion of the barcode and I would like to think that the barcode generator - Fusion Pro, in this case, would have some mechanism as well.
You may need to embed a CR (carriage return) or LF (line feed) or both at the very end of the data to get Excel to accept the input and automatically move between lines, or you may have to scan into notepad, then import to Excel.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Matrix for details on data encoding.
Related
I am working on invoice parser which extracts data from invoices in pdf or image format.It works on simple pdf with non tabular data but gives lots of output data to process with pdf which contains tables.I am not able to get a working generic solution for this.I have tried the following libraries
Invoice2Data : It is based on templates.It has given fairly good results in json format till now.But Template creation for complex pdfs containing dynamic table is complex.
Tabula : Table extraction is based on coordinates of the table to be extracted.If the data in the table increases the table length increases and hence the coordinates changes.So in this case it gives wrong results.
Pdftotext : It converts any pdfs to text but with the format that needs lots of parsing which we do not want.
Aws_Textract and Elis_Rossum_Ai : Gives all the data in json format.But if the table column contains multiple line then json parsing becomes difficult.Even the json given is huge in size to parse.
Tesseract : Same as pdftotext.Complex pdfs are not parseable.
Other than all this or with combination of the above libraries has anyone been able to parse complex pdf data please help.
I am working on a similar business problem. since invoices don't have fixed format so you can't directly use any text parsing method.
To solve this problem you have to use Computer Vision (Deep Learning) for field detection and Pytesseract OCR for converting image into text. For better understanding here are the steps:
Convert invoices to image and annotate the images with fields like address, Amount etc using tools like labelImg. (For better results use different types of 500-1000 invoices)
After Generating XML files train any object detection model like YOLO or TF object detection API.
The model will detect the fields and gives you coordinates of Region Of Interest(ROI). like
Apply Pytessract OCR on the ROI coordinates. Click Here
Finally, use regex to validate the text in the extracted field and perform any manipulation/transformation that is necessary. At last store data to CSV OR Database.
Hope my answer helps you! Upvote answer so it reaches to maximum people.
I want to use a barcode-scanner (+ data matrix) to perform an input in an existing excel file (*.xlsx). The content of the scanned code should be devidied into two cells, split accoring to a tabulator symbol.
I have generated the following data matrix with the content Hans<tab>Müller where <tab> equals the decimal character code of 9 in ASCII.
Scanning the matrix in Notepad++ (focus in Notepad, scanning the matrix) results in the correct result. But if I try the procedure in excel (selecting a cell, scanning the matrix), the input is HansMüller. I expected "Hans" in the selected cell and "Müller" in the cell next to the selected one. So, what am I doing wrong?
How can I read the content of a data matrix into multiple cells in excel?
Update:
I am using the scanner ElmiScan ECR14 from elmicron. The website http://codecorp.com/ConfigGuide/?product=CR1400 provides a list of all configuration "codes" (CR1400 equalls ECR14).
If I enable Control Character Input - Ctrl + Character as suggested by Brian, Excel reads HansMÄller and still ignores the tab.
I am getting "Hans<tab>Mller" in plain old Notepad, and HansMller in Excel indicating that Excel is interpreting the <CTRL-I> as a "let's start typing
in italics now". My system is probably dropping the "ü" because of my U.S. keyboard.
When I copy from Notepad into Excel, however the embedded tab character has the desired result and advances to the next cell. This indicates to me that the scanner is in the default state of "Disable Function Key Mapping" and has interpreted the <CTRL-I> you have in the Datamatrix barcode as the keystroke
<CTRL-I> instead of the <TAB> key.
The solution is to place the scanner into "Enable Function Key Mapping" mode, which is not the default mode by scanning the Function Key Mapping barcodes in your scanner manual.
EDIT: So, I've reviewed the website and 1400 Configuration Guide and needless to say, they disagree. So it looks like there are a few different options for setting keyboard language support, which is where I think the problem lies.
I would start with the Config Guide and test modes B4, D3, D2, C3, B2, and B3 in that order.
Then I would move onto the website based guide and check out each of the following modes just to be sure.
The fact that after your previous experiment the "ü" turns into a "Ä" tells me we are on the right track. One of these settings should produce an ASCII <TAB> keyboard character for Excel. If none of these works, I would contact technical support at Elmicron.
We need to parse the GS1 datamatrix barcode which will be provided by other party. We know they are going to use GTIN(01), lot number(10), Expiration date(17), serial number (21). The problems is that barcode reader output a string, the format is like this 01076123456789001710050310AC3453G321455777. Since there is not separator and both serial number and lot number are variable length according to GS1 standard, we have trouble to identify segments. My understanding is that it seems like the best way to parse is to embed the parser in the scanning device, not from the application. But we didn't plan an embed software yet. How can I implement the parser? Any suggestions?
There should be a FNC1 character at the end of a variable-length field that is not filled to maximum; so that FNC1 will appear between the G3 and the 21.
FNC1 is invisible to humans but can be detected by scanners and will be reproduced in the string reported by the scanner. Simply send the string directly to a text file and examine the text with a hex reader. the FNC1 should be obvious.
If you can, it might be an idea to swap the sequence of the 21 field and the 10 field since you appear to be using a pure-numeric for 21. This would make the barcode produced a little shorter.
One way to deal with this is to program the scanner to replace FNC1 with space or another plain text character before sending it to your application. The scanner manufacturer usually provides a tool to produce programming bar codes that can do simple substitutions in the scanner. Then you can parse the data without having to handle special characters.
I'm finding it difficult to parse a pdf file that's created in a non-english language. I used pdfbox and itext but couldn't find anything in there that could help parse this file. Here's the pdf file that I'm talking about: http://prapatti.com/slokas/telugu/vishnusahasranaamam.pdf The pdf says that it's created use LaTeX and Tikkana font. I have Tikkana font installed on my machine, but that didn't help. Please help me in this.
Thanks, K
When you say "parse PDF files", my first thought was that the PDF in question wasn't opening in various PDF viewers & libraries, and was therefore corrupt in some way.
But that's not the case at all. It opens just fine in Acrobat Reader X. And then I see the text on the page.
And when I copy/paste that text from the first page, I get:
Ûûp{¨¶ðQ{p{¨|={pÛû{¨>üb¶úN}l{¨d{p{¨> >Ûpû¶bp{¨}|=/}pT¶=}Nm{Z{Úpd{m}a¾Ú}mp{Ú¶¨>ztNð{øÔ_c}m{ТÁ}=N{Nzt¶ztbm}¥Ázv¬b¢Á
Á ÛûÁøÛûzÏrze¨=ztTzv}lÛzt{¨d¨c}p{Ðu{¨½ÐuÛ½{=Û Á{=Á Á ÁÛûb}ßb{q{d}p{¨ze=Vm{Ðu½Û{=Á
That's from Reader.
Much of the text in this PDF is written using various "Type 3" fonts. These fonts claim to use "WinAnsiEncoding" (Also Known As code page 1252), with a "differences" array. This differences array is wrong:
47 /BB 61 /BP /BQ 81 /C6...
The first number is the code point being replaced, the second is a Name of a character that replaces the original value at that code point.
There's no such character names as BB, BP, BQ, C9... and so on. So when you copy-paste that text, you get the above garbage.
I'm sorry, but the only reliable way to extract text from such a PDF is OCR (optical character recognition).
Eh... Long shot idea:
If you can find the specific versions of the specific fonts used to generate this PDF, you just might be able to determine the actual stream contents of known characters converted to Type 3 fonts in this way.
Once you have these known streams, you can compare them to the streams in the PDF and use that to build your own translation table.
You could either fix the existing PDF[s] (by changing the names in the encoding dictionary and Type 3 charproc entries) such that these text extractors will work correctly, or just grab the bytes out of the stream and translate them yourself.
The workflow would go something like this:
For each character in a font used in the form:
render it to PDF by itself using the same LaTeK/GhostScript versions.
Open the PDF and find the CharProc for that particular known character.
Store that stream along with the known character used to build it.
For each text byte in the PDF to be interpreted.
Get the glyph name for the given byte based on the existing encoding array
Get the "char proc" stream for that glyph name and compare it to your known char procs.
NOTE: This could be rewritten to be much more efficient with some caching, but it gets the idea across (I hope).
All that requires a fairly deep understanding of PDF and the parsing methods involved. But it just might work. Might not too...
How could the math types being represented in a format that are searchable like text?
I mean that there is a toolbar that you can have input math symbols and search for them as text, so the format can represent math symbols as text.
Is it such a task impossible to implement because math types can be represented only as icons?
What do you think is the proper implementation of a new format that loads symbols in memory like text-format?
Are there any existing solutions of searchable Math symbols in pdf or in any other format?
(I do not take under consideration Latex since you should use words for searching but not using math symbols directly and using words for searching a long Math formula could be very complex for writing down and the user could prefer to scroll the document than writing the whole latex-format of the math type)
Designing new fonts that represent Math symbols can help of solving the problem or not at all?
Thanks in advance!
We had the same problem for musical notation. It was almost impossible to search for more obscure markings found in baroque music.
Our solution was to create a mapping table using SQL (SQL Server 2012) and then create xref tables as needed for the implementing products. This became necessary for some of the tablets that the music schools (mainly in the Northwest oddly) that had significantly different requirements.
Good luck