Oh my goodness, this whole thread is deja vu from some code I wrote to parse my bank statements. I arrived at exactly the same solution of "pdftotext -layout"

Oh my goodness, this whole thread is deja vu from some code I wrote to parse my bank statements. I arrived at exactly the same solution of "pdftotext -layout" followed by a custom parser in Python. And ran into the same difficulty with tables: I wrote a custom table parser that uses heuristics to decide where column breaks are.