🔗 Parsing PDF documents at scale

PDF documents are ubiquitous in business, academia, and government, containing vast amounts of valuable information. However, extracting structured data from PDFs presents unique challenges, especially when dealing with thousands or millions of documents. This guide explores strategies and tools for parsing PDFs at scale.

The PDF Parsing Challenge

PDFs were designed for consistent visual presentation, not for data extraction. This creates several challenges:

1. Complex structure: PDFs combine text, images, tables, and forms
2. No standardized layout: Each PDF can have a unique format
3. Loss of semantic information: Original document structure is often lost
4. Content variety: Text can flow across columns, pages, and around images
5. Performance concerns: Processing large PDF collections efficiently