1. The 5-Second Test
Open the PDF and try selecting a table cell with your mouse. If you can highlight individual words, it's digital — extraction will work. If the whole page selects as one image block (or nothing selects), it's a scan with no text layer, and any text-based extractor returns a placeholder row by design.
2. Workarounds That Work Today
- Ask the sender for the original digital PDF or CSV export — banks and vendors provide these free.
- Re-print a photo scan via a scanner app's Enhance + Black & White filter, then retry.
- For 1–2 pages, convert ranges page-by-page and validate each sheet before merging.
3. Getting Clean Exports Next Time
Prefer e-statements over branch printouts, keep First row as header ON, and always validate row counts against the PDF page footer. OCR support for scanned pages is planned — digital PDFs already convert with full numeric fidelity today.
