Structured vs readable documents

The pillar guide

Structured vs readable documents explained: PDF, hybrid and structured compared - The pillar for document forms: what each form carries, what a system can do with it, and where each one breaks.

Working guides in this topic

• Accessible readable invoices for people, not only systems - Readable views that work for people with different needs, and why accessibility belongs in the view, not as an afterthought.
• Choosing a document form by receiver - A decision sequence: receiver requirement, format, route, then document form, in that order.
• Converting PDFs to structured invoices: a careful method - Extraction, mapping, validation and human review, with a rejection rule for low-confidence fields.
• Document form and audit evidence - What an auditor needs from each form, and why the structured layer plus status evidence is stronger than a PDF alone.
• Document form checklist before sending - A short pre-send check: form, data, validation, route and readable view, each signed off in order.
• Human-readable views of structured invoices - A structured invoice can still be shown to a person, and the view must be generated from the data, not typed beside it.
• Hybrid invoices: a PDF view with structured data attached - Factur-X and similar hybrids, how the two layers relate, and which layer wins when they disagree.
• PDF invoice limits: what a readable invoice cannot guarantee - Layout, searchable text and visual totals, and the three ways a PDF fails as machine-readable data.
• Scanned invoices and OCR risks - Why a scanned invoice plus OCR is a reading guess, and how that guess fails on totals, identifiers and lines.
• When a PDF is still the right answer - Small, one-off or human-checked transactions where a structured exchange adds cost without benefit.

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