in reply to How to parse PDF
The simple answer is you have to try it.
Pipe your pdf through the pdftotext tool (on Ubuntu in the poppler-utils package), and see if the output is parsable. That doesn't take very long, you can test it literally in two minutes.
Take a look at PDF::Parse and PDF and see if they help you.
But in principle it is much easier to validate the data before it is put into a PDF - have you tried to ask the external vendor if he could provide the same data in a format that is easier accessible?
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