Evaluate PDF parsing libraries

[djbrown]

currently using https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py/tree/master
problems:

• needs Java
• doesn't handle some corner cases well

Alternatives:

• https://github.com/camelot-dev/camelot
• https://github.com/pymupdf/PyMuPDF-Utilities

[filgit]

have tried both with camelot and tabula-py with the game reports. Both went well in my cases. Can you explain the "problem" cases? Is it related to correct_data.py ?

Why is needing java an issue and what are the corner cases you mention?

[djbrown]

@filgit the "problem" with java is that it's just an otherwise unnecessary technology/dependency in the system.
though it doesn't have a big impact on the code base:

hbscorez/README.md

Line 51 in 00ee8a8

1. Java (>=1.6) for parsing game report PDFs

hbscorez/Dockerfile

Line 8 in 00ee8a8

&& apt install -y --no-install-recommends default-jre fonts-liberation gsfonts locales \

for the "corner cases" I don't remember what exactly they were, but I have a long list of "erroneous reports",
e.g. where some players names overflow the column/cell like here. I guess my hope was, that another library would handle them better (currently overflows are clipped off).

performance might be another reason, but that should be measured first to really count as an argument.

but this issue didn't really have priority, else it wouldn't celebrate birthday soon 😅

[filgit]

okay, see. With camelot you will have ghostscript as an additional dependency.
And the error prone report you linked is a great example where the concept comes to its limits. I wonder, how the reports are created, btw.