Guides & articles
Practical notes from building the extractor: what is really inside a PDF, and how to get the numbers out of it intact.
Why PDF tables are hard to extract
A PDF has no concept of a table — only glyphs at coordinates. What is really inside the file, why copy and paste makes soup, and how geometry fixes it.
6 min read
Cleaning extracted tables for Excel
The grid is right and the columns line up, but the totals still will not add. The things that silently turn numbers into text, and the order to fix them.
6 min read
Scanned vs native PDFs: how to tell
Two files can look identical on screen and be completely different inside. Five seconds of checking tells you whether you need OCR before extracting.
4 min read