[daudi]

Originally Posted by nekokami

Wow! Please keep us posted. I'm very interested in this functionality. And I know a Java programmer who might help.

Will do. If you could ask your java programmer if there is any java-only way of getting an XML representation of a PDF that would help to direct things. At the moment I am using pdftohtml to do that. pdftohtml is based on xpdf code and I think this is the same as or related to the poppler library. AFAICT these are all C (C++?). I did a quick search to see if there is a java implementation of poppler but could not find anything. Perhaps there is some other java library that can do this, but I don't know enough about java to begin to look around efficiently.

The key thing is that the output of pdftohtml -xml is an xml file with the co-ordinates of each line of text. If there is a way this can be done using java alone then it will be easy to implement the rest and have the whole thing platform independent.

Originally Posted by nekokami

I've used R, but I had no idea you could do stuff like this with it.

I use R for my work almost every day (not necessarily very deeply) and so I'm more familiar with it than anything else. The R code to do this uses none of the things that makes R special, I'm just using it as a scripting language. I've used R for all sorts of things unrelated to statistics. I suppose one good reason for using R here it is so easy to use the plotting facilities of R to plot the scribbles. This helped with debugging.