Stop Parsing PDFs at Render Time: A Better Architecture for Structured Extraction (opens in new tab)

TLDR: The reason most frontend PDF extraction is wrong is that developers try to infer document structure from the rendered visual output instead of from the operator stream. De Casteljau subdivision, pixel-based column detection, and raster-scan zone boundaries are workarounds for not reading the data correctly in the first place. PDF Processor The Industry Default Is Backwards Here is what most frontend PDF tools do: render the page to a canvas at some scale, read text positions from getTex...