wvstolzing

I’ve seen paraphrases of the same thing at least 4 times so far. Multiple mothers confused about the terminology it seems.

PyMuPDF is excellent for extracting ‘structured’ text from a pdf page — though I believe ‘pulling out relevant information’ will still be a manual task, UNLESS the text you’re working with allows parsing into meaningful units.

That’s because ‘textual’ content in a pdf is nothing other than a bunch of instructions to draw glyphs inside a rect that represents a page; utilities that come with mupdf or poppler arrange those glyphs (not always perfectly) into ‘blocks’, ‘lines’, and ‘words’ based solely on whitespace separation; the programmer who uses those utilities in an end-user facing application then has to figure out how to create the illusion (so to speak) that the user is selecting/copying/searching for paragraphs, sentences, and so on, in proper reading order.

PyMuPDF comes with a rich collection of convenience functions to make all that less painful; like dehyphenation, eliminating superfluous whitespace, etc. but still, need some further processing to pick out humanly relevant info.

Built-in regex capabilities of Python can suffice for that parsing; but if not, you might want to look into NLTK tools, which apply sophisticated methods to tokenize words & sentences.

EDIT: I really should’ve mentioned some proper full text search tools. Once you have a good plaintext representation of a pdf page, you might want to feed that representation into tools like the following to index them properly for relevant info:

https://lunr.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ – this is easy to use, & set up, esp. in a python project.

… it’s based on principles that are put to use in this full-scale, ‘industrial strength’ full text search engine: https://solr.apache.org/ – it’s a bit of a pain to set up; but python can interface with it through any http client. Once you set up some kind of mapping between search tokens/keywords/tags, the plaintext page, & the actual pdf, you can get from a phrase search, for example, to a bunch of vector graphics (i.e. the pdf) relatively painlessly.

Those are Stimpies though. Stimpies of the Ren faire.

Yeah I keep running into similar issues when trying to build pretty much anything on windows; for stuff that can’t be ‘nicely’ configured & dependency-managed through an IDE, windows is pure pain.

It really sounds like PySide would fit your use case better. Check out this website for a great starting point: https://www.pythonguis.com/pyqt6/ – the author also has an entire book on packaging PySide programs for cross-platform distribution.

As for installing Python itself; I think I’d stick with the plain installer from python.org, and afterwards, pip. In case of dependencies that are hard to get through PyPi, I think anaconda might be worth looking at as well: https://www.anaconda.com/download

msys2 provides a package manager, & several development toolchains; it’s an easy way to get native (mingw) gcc & bash on windows; cross-platform programs rely on it heavily, because it saves them from all the ‘visual studio’ BS: https://www.msys2.org/docs/what-is-msys2/ – I believe any implementation of GTK on windows requires a mingw toolchain.

Am I missing something?

It’s impossible to tell without knowing what specific aspect had failed.

Before we even get to GTK; there are some issues with python wheels under msys2; check out: https://www.msys2.org/docs/python/ – some wheels just can’t be built under msys2 due to various incompatibilities. Not being able to replace such packages with ‘pure’ python equivalents could end up being a (very annoying) roadblock.

The roadblock that I recently ran into with my simple GTK4 app was unpredictable ids on d-bus interface exports. D-bus does work under msys2; though you have to start the user session manually; d-feet and gdbus also work; though, as always, there’s a catch. On Linux I can automaticaly export ‘action groups’ that belong to GtkApplicationWindow widgets; & their 'object path’s show up predictably under the application’s path + / + the window’s id. This makes it really convenient when you want to add basic ‘remote controls’ to your widgets. Under msys2, though, I can’t figure out how to find those paths; which throws a monkey wrench, so to speak, in my ‘remote control’ implementation. Granted, d-bus is a linux-native technology; and expecting it to work w/o issues on windows is probably a bit too much.

– apart from those, I haven’t run into any issues with GTK4 under msys2. The GTK3 packages available in their repos also work just fine.

I do agree with the others who recommend PySide, though. Their cross platform support appears to be more robust. Their documentation has been improving as well.

and then try to play Doom on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5NTJSfUWDE