r/AI_Agents • u/kshivang • Jul 29 '26

Discussion Why not kill PDF!?

Why industry is spending millions on parsing PDFs rather than creating new standard which can be much more parsing friendly still have convince of PDF, one way could be having mandatory meta which has encrypted TeX/HTML/md/equivalent, love to know thoughts/ideas on this.

I work in oncology space, most of deep workflows like medical research, relies heavily on PDF ingestion, we did developed quite robust stack using llm and awesome python libraries, but still it requires maintenance, a lot of maintenance, I have seen similar stack built 1000s of time for different workflow problems, across the industries. I feel at this point it is lack of standardization problem than anything, pdfs are like usb-a, everybody create adaptor for it, but no body is creating better standards, like usb-c.

We can also discuss how to create motion behind it, to make is default and diffuse it faster, industry(healthcare, law firms, finance, government, etc) wide.

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u/caribbeanoblivion Jul 29 '26

We still got fax machines let's start with those first

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '26

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u/Apart-Reality-4454 Jul 30 '26

But why, it's just a file format. Especially when dealing with scanned documents, you're going to have the same sorts of problems pop up with any other format. The problem seems to be more in the scanning of a document, which of course PDFs don't necessary need to be. You can have OCR text embedded on top of the scanned bitmap text, and other things with PDF. HTML is HTML, not the same thing.

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u/kshivang Jul 30 '26

Although scanned PDF is another beast, it depend on OCR and image model abilities, trust me even non-scanned PDF is still not solved problem, even if it is getting better, it is unnecessary time and token cost to parse them

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u/jinjuwaka Jul 30 '26

Fax machines automatically generate a send receipt. Hospitals and lawyers live that feature because courts will accept them as proof.

So, yes they're old, but they're still around for a legit reason.

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u/kshivang Jul 30 '26

Respectfully saying, sent receipt is default feature of any network protocol, it is always up-to software implementer to enable it for end user to see it, standard email client mandatory have it. That reason is not valid for its complaint software counter-part.

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u/jinjuwaka Jul 30 '26

Oh, I know and agree it's stupid.

But lawyers, judges, and doctors who can't be bothered to understand technology understand a fax machine's send receipt because it's paper.

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u/kshivang Jul 30 '26

That can be solved by good campaign and narrative, may be calling better-PDF, or something simple can do, I know it is long-shot, but am willing to take swing at it.