Exactly. The time spent developing a solution for your problem in pretty much any other language is going to cost magnitudes more than processing millions of do

Exactly. The time spent developing a solution for your problem in pretty much any other language is going to cost magnitudes more than processing millions of documents in python. And that’s ignoring the ongoing maintenance where the hackability of teasing data out of PDFs in ipython is going to top any other system. I have a soft spot for the work you’re doing since I’ve spent a good portion of my life now extracting data from PDFs and can appreciate the joys of the process more than most.