A microservice that cleans up technical PDFs - and does it for you

This idea makes no impression at first glance - it has no screen and no button. But what it does can save someone whole days of work. It is a microservice that takes technical PDF files and automatically puts them in order.

What exactly it does

It strips images out of the document - handling both vector graphics (drawings, diagrams, line charts) and raster ones (photos, scans). It removes tables. It leaves a clean, tidy file, ready for further use. All of it happens automatically - across hundreds of documents at once, in a single pass.

Why it is a huge job

Because it is normally done by hand. Someone sits down, opens file after file, selects and deletes elements page by page - laboriously, for hours, with mistakes that are easy to miss by the hundredth document. With technical PDFs, where vector lines and scans are mixed together, the work is especially thankless. The microservice does it in the background: evenly, quickly and the same way every time.

Where else it fits - a few ideas

I am writing about it because it is not one company’s problem. Manual document work is a daily reality in many places, and almost every one of these things can be handed to a service like this. A few scenarios that come to mind straight away:

• Archiving and digitising documents - cleaning up scans before they enter a repository; removing needless graphics and tables improves text recognition (OCR) and search.
• Preparing documents for AI - models that read documents work better on clean content; the service removes the “noise” before a file goes into analysis.
• Anonymisation and GDPR compliance - automatically removing unneeded elements before a document goes out.
• Migration into an ERP or document-flow system - bulk tidying of thousands of files before they enter a new system.
• Technical and tender documentation - separating text from drawings, to reassemble it or compare versions more easily.
• Standardising suppliers’ files - bringing documents in different layouts into one clean form.

An idea worth repeating

If someone in your company regularly does something to documents by hand - cutting, removing, tidying, retyping - it can almost certainly be turned into a quiet microservice that does it for them. There are surprisingly many such places in companies. Do you have document work that someone clicks through over and over? Show it to me - it can usually be handed to a machine.