Hey amelius! Though OCR would provide a generic solution, it would be an overkill for text-based PDFs. I'm working on getting a OCR solution up since there's still a lot of data that is trapped inside scanned PDFs and not text-based ones.

If you have any pointers in the OCR route, do suggest them here, or on this GitHub issue! https://github.com/socialcopsdev/camelot/issues/101

Hey vortex_ape, we're also working on extracting data trapped inside scanned PDFs and recently, we've begun to get good results using DL algos. I am based in Gurugram, would you like to catch up and exchange experiences?

It seems that generally you'd want all functions of an OCR engine aside from the character recognition itself—namely layout detection. (And sometimes you'll need the character recognition too.)

I'd bet that commercial OCR packages that are long in the game have unified code for these functions between regular OCR and PDF processing.

OCR is less reliable than looking at the character data directly, if it's available.