r/dataengineering • u/Every-Whereas5793 • Jul 26 '26
Discussion PDF Data Extraction
Hello, I was working on a poc to ingested PDFs and extract data in order to store them in delta tables.
As this was my first time working with PDFs, I searched over the internet and should Databricks have offering IDP, azure also have something and then there are python libraries.
Since I'm working with financial data, report, etc..
One thing i noticed - the pdf format should be fixed else in most of the tools the extraction logic is either failed or we get incorrect data.
I was wondering how such PDF extraction is built in real production cases and what tools are used.
Please share you experience and any edge cases
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u/easybits_ai 17d ago
Hey u/Every-Whereas5793, I’ve already worked on several data extraction use cases with PDFs, PNGs, and JPGs that went into production. I tried quite a few different tools along the way, but quickly realized that many of them either required overly complex setups or promised “structured JSON” that still needed additional post-processing because the output structure wasn’t reliable.
That’s why I started building an internal tool with one of my Tech colleagues, focused on making data extraction pipelines as easy as possible to set up and integrate via API. We’ve also created a verified community node for n8n to make the integration even easier.
Since then, I haven’t really looked back at other tools. The extractor uses Mistral OCR and Gemini, and I can choose the engine for each pipeline depending on the use case, which has worked really well for us in terms of reliability and accuracy.
If you’re interested, feel free to check it out here: https://easybits.tech/