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7 Open-Source Tools for Turning PDFs Into Training-Ready Data
Open-source tools to prepare PDF data for our machine learning workflow
PDF is one of the most common document formats we use to share information. PDFs can contain almost anything, from financial reports and research papers to invoices and scanned forms.
As data professionals, we might want to use all this information for our machine learning model, RAG system, or other data projects. However, PDF preserves how a document looks. It isn’t a clean dataset we can use immediately.
You might ask, “Why can’t we extract all the text and use it as our training data?”
Well, we could do that with a simple PDF. The problem comes when the document contains two columns, repeated headers, tables, formulas, scanned pages, or text inside images. We could extract every word and still get the wrong reading order. A table could also become one long block of text, losing the relationship between the label and its value.
This is why we need more than PDF-to-text conversion. We need to preserve the content, structure, and data source so we can inspect the result before using it.
Fortunately, many open-source tools can help. In this article, we will explore seven tools I would use to turn PDF documents into training-ready data. What…
