PDFs feel like they should be easy to pull data from. The numbers are right there on the screen. Yet anyone who has tried copying a table out of a PDF into a spreadsheet knows the result: merged cells, broken rows, columns that drift out of place. Why PDFs resist extraction A PDF is built for printing, not for reading by software. It stores where each character sits on a page, not what that character belongs to. A table in a PDF is usually just text placed at certain coordina