I'm what Cornelis van Lit from Digital Orientalist calls a "centaur," or a scholar who devotes time to developing software solutions to humanities research problems. I've run into a problem that been NOT BEEN able to solve by searching stackoverflow or other online resources.
I developed a FileMaker solution to manage 150,000 digital surrogates of original sources similar to way Reddit user restricteddata suggested a few years ago.
I want to extend my solution with Google's Vision API. In particular, I want to use Vision perform OCR on these digital surrogates. I saw a Youtube video which does exactly what I'm asking but with Amazon's Textract API. I've tried Textract on my digital surrogates and found unsatifactory results. My surrogates are in Spanish and a signifcant number of them are handwritten. Google's Vision API, in my case, has produced better results. Also, Vision has a Python client library that I'm very familiar with.
So my problem and question deals with Python integration with Filemaker Pro Advanced (NOT HOSTED ON FILEMAKER SERVER)
Is there a way to pass a PDF from a container field to Python? And after Python does its thing--splitting the PDF, processing individual images, sending said images to Vision, pasring results, and recombining them--send the output string back to FileMaker in a new field?
The trigger would be from the FileMaker side so using available python libs or making the solution an ODBC source would not be useful. There are some FileMaker pluggins that can run a Python script, I think, the way Python would run a subprocess from FileMaker, but there's no clear direction on how to do that. I'm a graduate student so paying for consulting is out of the question. Is there anyone out there that can help?
