System Design: PDF Processing Pipeline
A capstone system design walkthrough — designing a system that ingests, parses, transforms, and extracts structured data from PDF documents at scale — covering the ingestion and job queue, the multi-stage extraction pipeline (text, layout, tables, OCR for scanned pages), handling malformed and adversarial files safely, idempotent and resumable processing, human-in-the-loop review for low-confidence extractions, and the specific correctness, security, and throughput demands that make PDF processing a uniquely messy system design problem.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Why PDF Processing Is a Different Kind of Hard
