XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 AT cam.ac.uk>]

On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 9:41 AM, Dave Pawson <dave.pawson AT gmail.com> wrote:

> On 6 October 2013 09:05, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 AT cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> > FWIW for anyone interested in the problem I have written an Open Source
> > PDF-to-XML tool for (including diagrams) and this is based on XOM and
> > PDFBox
>
> And if we ask him nicely Peter will put it up on the web?
>

It's already on the web at http://bitbucket.org/petermr <various projects>.
I plan to "announce" it this week (probably on http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk).


> Prettty please Peter - scanning / OCR, save as, convert
> is an awfully messy route.
>

It is aimed at born-digital PDFs (which are still utterly revolting in some
cases - text made by stictching images - and "Unicode? what's that? doesn't
everyone use Symbol font?"). I don't have any magic for scanned images
(yet) but I am working towards vector-graphics-destroyed-as-PNG.

This is getting off-topic (and I'll mail Dave separately), but I'll end by
saying that XOM is a wonderful approach for modelling a great deal of what
I do, especially reconstructing structured documents from something awful.
All my data models are now basically stateless XOM which is clean and
performs well (I have a slight hint that Attributes and query() cause minor
performance problems in some cases, but I haven't looked in detail.



-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069