Alternatives & Comparison

EDS-PDF was developed to propose a more modular and extendable approach to PDF extraction than PDFBox, the legacy implementation at APHP's clinical data warehouse.

EDS-PDF takes inspiration from Explosion's spaCy pipelining system and closely follows its API. Therefore, the core object within EDS-PDF is the Pipeline, which organises the processing of PDF documents into multiple components. However, unlike spaCy, the library is built around a single deep learning framework, pytorch, which makes model development easier. Similar to spaCy and thinc, EDS-PDF also relies on catalogue entry points and a custom powerful custom configuration system. This allows complex pipeline models to be built and trained using either the library API or configuration files.