I used to think that I had matured. That I should stop letting my emotions get the better of me. Turns out there's only so much one can bottle up before it snaps.

Allow me to introduce you folks to this wonderful piece of software: PaddleOCR (https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/...). At this time I'll gladly take any free OCR library that isn't Tesseract. I saw the thing, thought: "Heh. 3 lines quick start. Cool.", and the accuracy is decent. I thought it was a treasure trove that I could shill to other people. That was before I found out how shit of a package it is.

First test, I found out that logging is enabled by default. Sure, logging is good. But I was already rocking my own logger, and I wanted it to shut the fuck up about its log because it was noise to the stuffs I actually wanted to log. Could not intercept its logging events, and somehow just importing it set the global logging level from INFO to DEBUG. Maybe it's Python's quirk, who knows. Check the source code, ah, the constructors gaves `show_log` arg to control logging. The fuck? Why? Why not let the user opt into your logs? Why is the logging on by default?

But sure, it's just logging. Surely, no big deal. SURELY, it's got decent documentation that is easily searchable. Oh, oh sweet summer child, there ain't. Docs are just some loosely bundled together Markdowns chucked into /doc. Hey, docs at least. Surely, surely there's something somewhere about all the args to the OCRer constructor somewhere. NOPE! Turns out, all the args, you gotta reference its `--help` switch on the command line. And like all "good" software from academia, unless you're part of academia, it's obtuse as fuck. Fine, fuck it, back to /doc, and it took me 10 minutes of rummaging to find the correct Markdown file that describes the params. And good-fucking-luck to you trying to translate all them command line args into Python constructor params.

"But PTH, you're overreacting!". No, fuck you, I'm not. Guess whose code broke today because of a 4th number version bump. Yes, you are reading correctly: My code broke, because of a 4th number version bump, from 2.6.0.1, to 2.6.0.2, introducing a breaking change. Why? Because apparently, upstream decided to nest the OCR result in another layer. Fuck knows why. They did change the doc. Guess what they didn't do. PROVIDING, A DAMN, RELEASE NOTE. Checked their repo, checked their tags, nothing marking any releases from the 3rd number. All releases goes straight to PyPI, quietly, silently, like a moron. And bless you if you tell me "Well you should have reviewed the docs". If you do that for your project, for all of your dependencies, my condolences.

Could I just fix it? Yes. Without ranting? Yes. But for fuck sake if you're writing software for a wide audience you're kinda expected to be even more sane in your software's structure and release conventions. Not this. And note: The people writing this, aren't random people without coding expertise. But man they feel like they are.

TLDR;
Side project update.

Made simple nlp library in python and published it’s first version to open source.
Now I can feed it with parsed pdf text.
See rant https://devrant.com/rants/2192388/...

Why ?
Cause during reading book about nltk I couldn’t find simple extendible way to provide support for polish language and I wanted to abstract stemming, word normalization, tokenizer etc. so I can provide ex. different conditions for separate text files and don’t write much code what is an asset when you work solo.

It’s about 12GB of pdf public accessible law data I am trying to handle ( at first ) which is about 35000 files from last 90 years.

So far I automated downloading web pages and pdf documents from them. Extracting data from web pages and saving it to database. Extracting text from pdf files. I have about 5-6 projects to do all of it above maybe at the end I will put it to some workflow manager like Luigi or just run it by cronjob.

First thing for website version 1.0 part is find correlation between all documents inside law text using nlp library by building custom conditions. Then just generate directory structure and html files with links between documents.

Website version 2.0 is already in my mind but it will be creepy to make it and will take at least 1-2 months and I want to publish fast.

I have some pdfs with only images instead of text and tesseract worked quite good with them so maybe I will try to process them when everything go live.

Learned a lot about pdf as now I know that font in pdf is not always providing unicode characters ( stupid form of obfuscation) so when you extract text you need to build glyph vector to text map for every font.
Pdf is full vector representation - just like svg - what is logic if you think a bit and know that some printers are running using postscript.

Let’s hope next update will be about flutter mobile app which started all of shit above. It’s almost ready ( except getting data from api I am trying to do and logo for release version ). It’s last piece of puzzle.

Developed this project "Audio Book Generator"

Implementing speech synthesis(📖 to 🗣) on eBooks
Bored with writing notes in a lecture? How about we convert the notes dictated by the lecturer into text? Use the speechtotext.py script to get the text format of spoken notes, which saves the text in a .txt file.
Too lazy to read a novel? Get an Ebook version of the novel and run the finalAudioBookGenerator.py script. It will generate an mp3(audio) format of the book. Enjoy book listening :)
You can also convert your single images using the singleImageReader.py script.

Demonstration:
https://youtu.be/xhMvGg1dAsg

Project:
https://github.com/globefire/...

Star If you liked it. :)