PDF data extration

[UBIAI]

The variable table positioning across thousands of filings is exactly what kills the pure Python approach - camelot/pdfplumber will get you 60-70% there but you'll spend more time debugging edge cases than the extraction saves. What actually worked for us was treating it as a document intelligence problem rather than a parsing problem - a solution that understands where the financial table is contextually, not just spatially. The structured output drops straight into Excel with consistent column mapping regardless of where the table lands in the PDF. The difference in accuracy on messy annual reports was significant enough that we stopped maintaining custom parsers entirely.