Lesson 3: Tables, charts and footnotes that survive parsing

Module 2 · Lesson 3 · About 50 minutes · Needs: Lesson 2 (what a PDF stores, running headers and footers), basic Python lists and dictionaries

The situation

Hannah wants the rest of the P9 purifier guide in Hollin Answers before the pilot. Lesson 2 parsed page 2, the fan settings. Page 3 is harder. It has a table with merged header cells, two columns of text, a formula, a footnote, a pointer to page 2 and a bar chart.

Customers already ask about it. One wrote: "Will the P9 clean a 25 m² bedroom on Turbo?" The answer sits in one table row: 26.7 m² at 5 air changes an hour. This lesson follows that page, and that row, through four parsers, and finds what each one loses.