I work in the print industry and some clients have the naive idea they'll save money by formatting their own documents (naive because usually this just means a lot more work for us, which they end up paying for).
We need some metadata to rearrange and sort PDF pages for mailing and delivery (such as name, address, and start/end page for that customer).
Our general rule is you provide metadata in an external file to make it easy for us. Otherwise, we run pdftotext and hope there's a consistent formatting for the output (e.g. every first page has "Issue Date:", "Dear XYZ,", or something written on it).
If that doesn't work then we're re-negotiating. It is not too difficult usually to build a parser for one family of PDF files based on a common setup as you've said and you get to learn various tricks. It is very difficult though to write a general parser.
Personally, I found parsing postscript easier since usually it was presented linearly.
We need some metadata to rearrange and sort PDF pages for mailing and delivery (such as name, address, and start/end page for that customer).
Our general rule is you provide metadata in an external file to make it easy for us. Otherwise, we run pdftotext and hope there's a consistent formatting for the output (e.g. every first page has "Issue Date:", "Dear XYZ,", or something written on it).
If that doesn't work then we're re-negotiating. It is not too difficult usually to build a parser for one family of PDF files based on a common setup as you've said and you get to learn various tricks. It is very difficult though to write a general parser.
Personally, I found parsing postscript easier since usually it was presented linearly.