In my last job, we encountered a lot of situations where we wanted to gather data from archival documents like PDFs where the text was very regular, consistent, and always in the same font and size. I had developed the means to read targeted text by comparing pixel colors to the background color. I was able to "read" data off of these documents very quickly and it streamlined a lot of processes. It worked best with standard fonts, for example non-italic, non-bold. I created a character map database that lived in a submacro and compared pixel groupings in the document to the database. The data could be transferred to any form, file, or website as required. The process started out in VB, but was gradually transferred into ME.