PDF extraction is usually blind. If you've ever tried to write a script to scrape a PDF, you know exactly what I mean. You run the PDF through a generic text extractor, and instead of a clean table, you get a jammed wall of text where the columns are violently shoved into a single vertical stack. Or worse, you try to use a table extractor, and it hallucinates tables everywhere. See a bold heading with an underline? The parser thinks that's a 1x1 table. See a horizontal divider between paragraphs? Boom, phantom table. Why does this happen? Because most PDF parsers process the document in a strict, sequential pipeline. They look at all the lines. They look at all the text. And they just smash them together. I got tired of this. So I re-engineered the extraction pipeline in our PDF processor to stop reading the document like a machine, and start seeing it like a human. Here is the math behind Context-Aware PDF Extraction. 1.…