# Getting two-column reading order, ruled tables and CJK text right when converting PDFs to Markdown for RAG

> Source: <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/getting-two-column-reading-order-ruled-tables-and-cjk-text-right-when-converting-pdfs-to-markdown-for-rag/190697#post_1>
> Published: 2026-10-17 08:21:25+00:00

Many bad RAG answers over PDFs start at extraction, not embeddings. I’ve been working on PDF to Markdown conversion and wanted to share what made the biggest difference, plus a small runnable example.

**What breaks with plain text extraction**

**What worked (pdfplumber + pdfminer.six, both MIT)**

Then chunk on headings: each chunk keeps its section title, which helps retrieval a lot.

Limits of this approach: no OCR (it only reads the existing text layer), and borderless tables still come out as text.

Full write-up with a runnable script that builds a two-column sample PDF, shows the broken output, then the fixed Markdown and heading-based chunks:

Disclosure: I also maintain a hosted version of this as a paid Apify Actor (mentioned at the end of the article), but everything above works with the open-source libraries alone.

I’d like to hear what others use. Have Docling, Marker or pymupdf4llm handled multi-column and CJK documents well for you, and how do you deal with borderless tables?