Extracting usable, mappable, unstructured data from a PDF or converting PDF files into structured data is a tough nut to crack. In other words, PDF data extraction process have multiple complexities. Often, data available in PDFs is not legible and is prone to errors while parsing. There’s no sense of a schema in a PDF, and schema mapping is another hurdle to surmount.
Further, images and columns of data need to be filtered out to arrive at usable data in the PDF. Even then, the usable data is unstructured and all over the place, and it needs a lot of firepowers to read, process, and map to make it actionable.
Extracting data from PDF using manual rekeying methods involve a lot of steps that make it tedious, error-prone and not scalable.
In simple words, converting PDF files into structured data presents some other challenges, including:
- 1.Varying Formats: PDF files can have different layouts, fonts, and structures, making it difficult to extract data consistently.
- 2.Text Extraction: Extracting text accurately from PDFs can be challenging due to embedded images, scanned documents, or non-standard fonts.
- 3.Data Integrity: Ensuring data integrity during extraction is crucial as PDFs may contain hidden or corrupted text.
- 4.Metadata Extraction: Extracting metadata like document properties or annotations requires specialized techniques.
- 5.Security Restrictions: Encrypted or password-protected PDFs may impose limitations on data extraction.
- 6.Resource Intensive: Processing large volumes of PDFs and handling complex extraction requirements can be resource-intensive and require continual IT support.
- 7.Accuracy and Validation: Ensuring the accuracy and validation of extracted data may require manual verification or validation against other sources.
Automated PDF data extraction by Adeptia, on the contrary, can greatly reduce the complexity, improve data integrity, and enhance the speed as well as the quality of conversions without much operational load and delays.
Adeptia provides an easy way for customers to convert PDF files into structured data. The need for IT teams to perform executing custom coding and complex EDI mapping gets eliminated and non-technical business users can drive data extraction tasks from unstructured PDF files at the speed of business.
Not only can Adeptia streamline the data extraction process from PDF files but also make it easy enough to be used by non-IT users. Rules governing data extraction from a PDF can be defined through a simple graphical user interface that can be easily used by business users. While data extraction is being handled by business users, IT users become free to focus on more high-value tasks.