Why the Industry Should Kill PDF for a Parsing-Friendly Standard
kshivang · reddit · 2026-07-30
The author points out that industries—especially medical research—waste millions parsing PDFs. Even with LLMs and Python libraries, the resulting parsing stacks require heavy maintenance, and similar workflows are rebuilt thousands of times across different sectors.
This is fundamentally a lack of standardization. The author compares PDFs to the old USB-A port: everyone builds adaptors, but no one pushes for a better underlying standard. They propose creating a new, parsing-friendly file standard that mandates metadata containing encrypted TeX/HTML/Markdown equivalents, eliminating the need for complex parsing altogether.
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