Why are all the amounts values negative?
8 hours ago
- A customer reported that all amount values in a converted PDF were negative.
- The PDF encoded amounts with trailing minus signs; positive values had an invisible minus sign (same gray level as background).
- The minus sign was present but invisible, causing the extraction to capture it as a negative value.
- Two solutions proposed: OCR the PDF (slower, less accurate) or strip out non-black text (requires storing text color).
- The root cause is the use of trailing minus signs with an invisible sign for positive values for right alignment.