At Rearc Data, we build a wide variety of data pipelines from hard-to-process sources. These include PDF reports, web dashboards, and free text. Often, there is some pattern or visual guide that enables us to extract data cleanly. Other times, the data we want is entirely unstructured in that context, and there’s no “right” way to extract it. To illustrate this problem, let’s use a real-world use case. One of our Health and Life Sciences (HLS) datasets pulls weekly influenza data from a PDF report published by a Spanish agency.