Practical guides for engineers who turn PDFs and scans into data. Each one explains the problem, shows working code in Python, and points out where documents usually break a pipeline.
Language models read Markdown far better than raw PDF text, but most converters flatten tables and scramble two column pages. This guide shows how to keep headings, reading order and tables intact so your prompts and embeddings see the document as a person does.
Read the guide to convert PDF to MarkdownScanned PDFs have no text layer, so text libraries return nothing and raw OCR returns loose words. This guide walks through calling an OCR API from Python and turning a scanned page into blocks, tables and typed fields.
Read the OCR API Python guideTables are where PDF extraction fails most often, with merged headers, wrapped cells and tables that continue on the next page. This guide compares approaches in Python and shows how to get clean rows and CSV out of difficult layouts.
Read how to extract tables from PDF in PythonLoose JSON pulled from a document is hard to validate and harder to store. This guide shows how to convert PDF to JSON with typed fields, confidence scores and source pages, and how to validate the result before it reaches your database.
Read how to convert PDF to JSONFixed size chunks cut tables in half and separate clauses from their headings, which hurts retrieval. This guide explains section based PDF chunking for RAG with page numbers, section paths and bounding boxes for citations.
Read the guide to PDF chunking for RAGChoosing between libraries, cloud OCR and parsing APIs is a decision about output quality, cost per page, security and maintenance. This checklist lists the questions to ask and the tests to run on your own documents before you commit.
Read the checklist for PDF data extraction toolsEvery guide uses real requests you can run. When you want to try the same steps on your own file, the PDF parser on our home page parses page one without an account, and the document parsing API reference lists every option used in the guides. Plans and page limits are on PDF extraction API pricing.
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