PDF Extraction Wrecks RAG: Converting to Markdown Cuts Token Costs by 40-65%
Training_Anybody5754 · reddit · 2026-08-19
PDF parsing is often overlooked in RAG systems but is a critical bottleneck. Poor parsers break reading order, flatten tables, and inject OCR noise, leading models to embed garbage data.
Converting documents to clean Markdown before chunking consistently yields better retrieval. Surprisingly, removing repeated page furniture reduces token counts by 40–65%, directly cutting costs. The author is currently weighing the trade-offs between extraction accuracy, token count, and parsing speed, calling for benchmarks on how parser quality affects final RAG performance.
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