Local PDF Parsing with AWS Textract & Python (Part 1)

✍️ Introduction Throughout my experience working with clients from domains like healthcare, insurance, and legal, I often found myself curious about how certain backend document workflows functioned, especially in healthcare. While supporting these systems, I’d often get paged for incidents related to PDF pipelines: upload failures, script errors, or extraction gaps. At that stage, like many in support roles, we’re limited to handling outcomes rather than building or understanding the full solution. Over time, as we gain more experience, build trust, and make people feel confident in our abilities, we gradually get the opportunity to be part of architecture discussions and solution design conversations. But that curiosity about how these pipelines actually work — from PDF upload to raw text extraction — always stayed with me. So I decided to finally explore this from scratch, hands-on, and document it as a small weekend project. This repository reflects that journey — one that started with a question and ended with deeper insights, hands-on practice, and a working prototype. My hope is that others who share this curiosity will find this just as helpful.

May 10, 2025 - 14:29

Local PDF Parsing with AWS Textract & Python (Part 1)

✍️ Introduction

Throughout my experience working with clients from domains like healthcare, insurance, and legal, I often found myself curious about how certain backend document workflows functioned, especially in healthcare. While supporting these systems, I’d often get paged for incidents related to PDF pipelines: upload failures, script errors, or extraction gaps. At that stage, like many in support roles, we’re limited to handling outcomes rather than building or understanding the full solution.

Over time, as we gain more experience, build trust, and make people feel confident in our abilities, we gradually get the opportunity to be part of architecture discussions and solution design conversations. But that curiosity about how these pipelines actually work — from PDF upload to raw text extraction — always stayed with me.

So I decided to finally explore this from scratch, hands-on, and document it as a small weekend project. This repository reflects that journey — one that started with a question and ended with deeper insights, hands-on practice, and a working prototype. My hope is that others who share this curiosity will find this just as helpful.