PDF to Text, a challenging problem

Having built some toy parsers for PDF files in the past it was a huge wtf moment for me when I realized how the format works. With that in mind, it's even more puzzling how it's used often in text-heavy cases.

I always think about the invoicing use-case: digital systems should be able to easy extract data from the file while still being formatted visually for humans. It seems like the tech world would be much better off if we migrated to a better format.

XML+XSLT was almost this, but unfortunately browsers no longer support it for local XML files, only ones on a remote server.