The problems don't actually exist in the way you think.

When extracting text directly, the goal is to put it back into content order, regardless of stream order. Then turn that into a string. As fast as possible.

That's straight text. if you want layout info, it does more. But it's also not just processing it as a straight stream and rasterizing the result. It's trying to avoid doing that work.

This is non-trivial on lots of pdfs, and a source of lots of parsing issues/errors because it's not just processing it all and rasterizing it, but trying to avoid doing that.

When rasterizing, you don't care about any of this at all. PDFs were made to raster easily. It does not matter what order the text is in the file, or where the tables are, because if you parse it straight through, raster, and splat it to the screen, it will be in the proper display order and look right.

So if you splat it onto the screen, and then extract it, it will be in the proper content/display order for you. Same is true of the tables, etc.

So the direct extraction problems don't exist if you can parse the screen into whatever you want, with 100% accuracy (and of course it doesn't matter if you use AI or not to do it).

Now, i am not sure i would use this method anyway, but your claim that the same problems exist is definitely wrong.

I don’t think people are suggesting : Build a renderer > build an ocr pipeline > run it on pdfs

I think people are suggesting : Use a readymade renderer > use readymade OCR pipelines/apis > run it on pdfs

A colleague uses a document scanner to create a pdf of a document and sends it to you

You must return the data represented in it retaining as much structure as possible

How would you proceed? Return just the metadata of when the scan was made and how?

Genuinely wondering

Sometimes scanned documents are structured really weird, especially for tables. Visually, we can recognize the intention when it's rendered, and so can the AI, but you practically have to render it to recover the spatial context.

PDF to raster seems a lot easier than PDF to structured data, at least in terms of dealing with the odd edge cases. PDF is designed to raster consistently, and if someone generates something that doesn't raster in enough viewers, they'll fix it. PDF does not have anything that constrains generators to a sensible structured representation of the information in the document, and most people generating PDF documents are going to look at the output, not run it through a system to extract the structured data.