Will Appian's upcoming IDP Application support fillable PDFs document?
Last I checked with Google Support, and available Google OCR and Google Vision they do not support OCR on the fillable PDF field. The PDFs have to be externally flattened (lose the fillable fields) and then passed in order for Google OCR or Vision to extract entities from those fields. Will this be handled by the IDP application or this has to be handled outside the application. Also, if it has to be handled outside the IDP, what is the best way to convert fillable PDF to flat PDF? I didn't find any smart service in the Appian that readily does this.
Thank you.
Gavin Dias.
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
The course of actions depends on it if you own the pdf-files. If yes, then OCR is not necessary at all because you know the names of the fillable fields in the pdfs. Appian can grab the key-value pairs out of the document and e.g. write it to a database or whatever you would like to do as a next step.
Hi juergeng393,
Thank you for your response. In the case that I am working with, the document has fillable fields and has Data Extract set to not allow and I am not able to get the fields and data using the PDF Tool plugin [getpdffields()]. Is there any other plugin or Smart service you use to grab the key-value pair in Appian.
Hi Gavin - IDP aside, it sounds like you're facing unnecessary complexity. Were it me, I'd look to the owner of the PDF to provide an unlocked PDF template. Using a copy of Acrobat (not reader, but the full version), you should be able to access the field properties and configure them. Even when the PDF is fillable, and the fields are mapped, it's not uncommon to run into duplicate field ID values which lead to unexpected behavior when filling with PDF tools.
Hi Gavin, can you please provide an example PDF with the fillable fields?
Gavin - I have checked with Google Support and they confirmed that it is not currently supported. It is on their radar as a future feature requests.
Thank you, matthew.shutt. That answers my question. I was just curious if IDP handles that case too somehow and what all types of documents it will support. I can definitely look for such documents and handle them separately.
Also, at this point, I do not have a fillable PDF on hand that I can share. I will try to find one and share it asap.
Excited to have hands-on IDP Application.
Thanks.