PDF datasheets are the bane of my existence. Within my domain of expertise (space engineering), the problem is even worse. Not only do suppliers provide haphaz

PDF datasheets are the bane of my existence. Within my domain of expertise (space engineering), the problem is even worse. Not only do suppliers provide haphazard information about parts through PDF documents, there's very little, if any, real convergence on what to actually provide to the engineer. I'm confident that these highly unstructured PDF datasheets are going to go the way of the dinosaurs, but it's quite challenging to integrate any smarter solutions into the business chain. My domain of expertise is the space industry, and it's stunning how much of a mess datasheets are. As an engineer on different missions, I couldn't understand why I was spending so much time trying to "undo" all of the work the suppliers had done to create these documents, to be able to get the data into into the tools that I needed to use and actually start my real work. In the space industry at least, there's a concerted effort going on to try to replace these PDF documents with electronic, machine-readable equivalents. Through the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) [1] and work being done by agencies like ESA [2], and private industry [3], but really it's not yet taking hold for a lot of operational reasons. We're actually working on trying to digitalize the entire global supply chain by converting PDF datasheets into something that allows more intelligent engineering work. We're currently serving "level-1" through our website: https://satsearch.co https://satsearch.co. We've also prototyped a way to cast the datasheets into something more usable with ESA and a number of other partners. We've currently serving this digitalized data through our API: https://api.satsearch.co https://api.satsearch.co, which is being integrated into industry tools. The real dream for me is to get to the point where the engineer can work with this kinda data natively within their tools and skip the entire PDF datasheet fiasco. Ideally, the data can then even be operated on my multi-objective optimization algos to speed up the entire design process. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founders at satsearch and we started our startup precisely because I was just sick of dealing with PDF datasheets. [1] http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ http://ecss.nl/glossary/eds/ [2] https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachments/2942/3699/02_-_SAVOIR_EDS_Definition_Overview_and_Status.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/252/contributions/3844/attachme... [3] https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachments/1658/1950/SOIS_EDS_ADCSS_2013_v1.0.pdf https://indico.esa.int/event/22/contributions/1997/attachmen...