Why merged cells break table extraction from multi-column PDFs

<p>If you have ever copy-pasted a table out of a PDF, you already know what happens. Rows collapse into one long line of text. Columns interleave. Numbers land in the wrong cell,

<p>When you need to extract tables from PDFs in Python, three libraries dominate every Stack Overflow answer and tutorial from the past few years: Tabula, Camelot, and pdfplumber.

<p>Building RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines is a great way to supercharge LLMs with custom data. However, if your pipeline relies on parsing standard PDFs, you've

<p>The problem I kept running into: a financial report where a subtotal on page 8 is wrong, but nobody spots it until the numbers get aggregated into a spreadsheet and something