duncanmcqueen is giving legal PDFs their structure back

PDFs often look orderly to a reader but arrive as a jumble of tiny text fragments. Duncanmcqueen's proposed approach rebuilds the page from its layout, rather than treating every fragment as ordinary prose.

• Reconstructs lines and wrapped clauses in their intended reading order.
• Avoids false spaces inside words split by PDF typography.
• Retains paragraph breaks, indentation, and limited column spacing for items such as signature blocks and simple tables.
• Keeps page order and existing fallbacks for PDFs whose text cannot be read.

That matters because the same extracted text feeds document chat and citation matching: better source text should mean answers and quoted passages that track the original document more closely.