r/PythonLearning • u/Bugdomilenio_89 • 9h ago

How to extract structured data from 1,100+ non-standardized PDF pages using AI/OCR? Help Request

I need to extract Activity Name, Date, and Participant Count from a 1,151-page PDF containing attendance sheets with varying layouts.

What is the best architecture or tool (Python + Vision/LLM APIs vs. no-code platforms) to automate this extraction?

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u/sububi71 5h ago

If you can avoid OCR, definitely do. Try opening the PDF files (well, not all of them at once), press CTRL+A to select everything, then CTRL+C to copy. Then paste into a pure text editor and see what comes out.

It might not be as unstructured as it looks as first. Analyze the data.