Disclaimer - Founder of Tensorlake, we built a Document Parsing API for developers.
This is exactly the reason why Computer Vision approaches for parsing PDFs works so well in the real world. Relying on metadata in files just doesn't scale across different source of PDFs.
We convert PDFs to images, run a layout understanding model on them first, and then apply specialized models like text recognition and table recognition models on them, stitch them back together to get acceptable results for domains where accuracy is table stakes.
This is exactly the reason why Computer Vision approaches for parsing PDFs works so well in the real world. Relying on metadata in files just doesn't scale across different source of PDFs.
We convert PDFs to images, run a layout understanding model on them first, and then apply specialized models like text recognition and table recognition models on them, stitch them back together to get acceptable results for domains where accuracy is table stakes.