Vision Writer

vision-writer-py

Made with love from Oberon Studios

About

Vision Writer is a PDF to Txt converter, build using Google Cloud Vision API. It is implemented in Python, using Flask framework to bootstrap api.

Architecture and app flow

First, user submits post request to Flask server with pdf as a payload. Server converts pdf to jpg(multiple pages), and sends converted pictures to Google Cloud Vision API, page by page. On return, server extracts text data, and writes it to a text file, appedning page after page. Name of the txt file, is SHA1 hash of current timestamp. Finally, server responsd with txt file as attachment.

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Build with:

• Flask (Python)
• Google Cloud Vision API

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Documentation

Prereqs

• Python 3.5.x or newer
• Google Cloud account with Cloud Vision API enabled Read more

Installation

First, follow this guide to get your Google credentials, and save them in root directory as config.json

Configure virtual environment (In this example, I am using Virtualenv, but you are free to do it your own way)

First, check Python version installed

On Linux, one of the possible ways is to enter $ /usr/bin/python in your terminal and hit Tab key twice

This would show all the available vesrsions

python             python3            python3.6m         python3m
python2            python3.6          python3.6m-config  python3m-config
python2.7          python3.6-config   python3-config     

Now, create environment with desired version of Python specified, as --python=PY_VERSION (Note: Django 2.x.. requres Python 3.x.. version!)

$ virtualenv MY_ENV --python=python3.6

Activate your environment, and install dependencies

Note: If your environment name differs from MY_ENV, you would have to use source YOUR_ENV_NAME/bin/activate as first command

$ source activate &&  pip install -r requirements_dev.txt

Run

Set flask server file, and google config file locations as env variables

export FLASK_APP=server.py
export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="<path>/config.json"

For permanent affect, make sure to add this two lines to your ~/.bash_profile

Finally, you are ready to launch your app (-p 3000 option is for custom port number)

flask run -h localhost -p 3000

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Built With

• html
• python
• shell