Rastering and OCR'ing PDF is like using regex to parse XHTML. My eyes are starting to bleed out, I am done here.
But im a guy who's in the market for a pdf parser service, im happy to pay pretty penny per page processed. I just want a service that works without me thinking for a second about any of the problems you guys are all discussing. What service do I use? Do I care if it uses AI in the lamest way possible? The only thing that matters are the results. There are two people including you in this thread ramming with pdf parsing gyan but from reading it all, it doesn't look like I can do things the right way without spending months fully immersed in this problem alone. If you or anyone has a non blunt AI service that I can use Ill be glad to check it out.
Use a solution that renders PDF into structured data if you want correct and reliable data.