I Built the Same B2B Document Extractor Twice: Rules vs. LLM

A comparison is made between two approaches for extracting structured data from B2B PDF documents. The first method is a traditional, rule-based system using pytesseract and regex, while the second employs an LLM-based approach with Ollama and LLaMA 3. The analysis aims to identify the point at which an LLM becomes more practical than regex as document layout complexity increases. The content also serves as a detailed, step-by-step tutorial for setting up the required tools, including Tesseract for OCR, Poppler for PDF rendering, and Ollama for running the local LLM.