On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 9:00 PM, <gedau AT igor2 DOT repo DOT hu>= wrote:

On Thu, 3 Sep 2015, Ouabache Designworks (z3qmtr45 AT gmail DOT com) [via geda-user AT delorie DOT com] wrote:

https://medium.com/@zakho= muth/disrupting-electronic-design-automation-8988f
72299e3

Btw, somewhat off-topic, the part not covered by geda-user discussions usua= lly: pdf datasheets. I really like his rant on how useless distributing dat= a in pdf is.

I face that problem from time to time. Last december I had it with an arm c= ortex. I wanted to extract the register names, bit names and magic values (= e.g. this bit in this register always has to be 1). C source and other stuf= f comes with an EULA that doesn't let me do what I want. Datasheet is i= n pdf. Most of the relevant data are in almost uniform tables.

I thought I'd just convert the pdf to html and extract <table> no= des... I laugh at this idea in retrospect. I tried with various tools and v= arious settings. Never got a <table>. Turned out the pdf just draws t= he borders and draws the text separately. The render looks like if it was a= table. The html some tools produce look the same as the pdf. In practice, = it's not a table in those htmls, just a big background bitmap with the = lines and the text printed onto it at pixel coords.

I ended up with a "table mapping" script that takes the bitmap, s= cans lines and columns to map cell coordinates then reads all the text from= the html and determine which cell they are in.

And this is only the first step to convert the data of a datasheet to a mac= hine readable form on the lowest level... Upper levels in separate scripts = took the table map and tried to read the header and convert the info into a= register description.

I agree with the upverter guy. In the age of thousand page datasheets, non-= machine-readable format is a bug that needs to be fixed. On the other hand = I'm highly sceptic about vendors being cooperative on this.

Regards,

Igor2

In the old days I would keep a pr= inted copy of all the IC's that I was working on in a binder on my shel= ves. But as chips grew that became impossible. A single chip today could ea= siy take up hundreds of feet=C2=A0 of shelf space

and searchi= ng it is impossible. Upverter is a commercial vendor so I understand that t= hey do have to make a buck but Zak does bring up an interesting point. It i= s not open source vs commercial that we are dealing with. It is

Big EDA vs everybody. We have to start talking with each other and come = up with usable standards that do not lock us into big eda tools.

John Eaton