PDF Table Extraction looks easy - until it fails in production.

Redesigning Banking PDF Table Extraction: A Layered Approach with Java

PDF table extraction often looks easy until it fails in production. Real bank statements can be messy, with scanned pages, shifting layouts, merged cells, and wrapped rows that break standard Java parsers. This article shares how we redesigned the approach using stream parsing, lattice/OCR, validation, scoring, and selective ML to make extraction more reliable in real banking systems.