Which Type of Organizations Receive a Large Number of PDF Documents?

Which type of organizations receive a large number of PDF documents?

All types, and it's not a sound data management practice. All too often I've seen PDFs used as a method for data exchange. The process is far from perfect and can be very fragile. Sometimes it is as simple as copying and parsing data from a tabular format in a PDF file and storing it in a database table, but more often than not you have to analyze a document, figure out where the data you want is stored, and develop rules for extracting it, manipulating it, and storing it in a structured format. For very complex layouts you can use OCR software that lets you define zones on the PDF containing the data elements you want to extract. The real problem is this. Almost all data structures used for data exchange, either text files, PDFs, or XML, eventually change. Detecting change in PDFs is difficult, you typically only notice it when a data import process breaks, and reacting to the change takes time.