interesting yeah parsing DWG/DXF natively makes sense when the source file is clean and well-structured. The precision argument is valid in controlled environments.
The challenge we kept running into is that construction drawings in the wild aren’t always that clean. Unresolved xrefs, exploded dynamic blocks, version incompatibilities, SHX font substitutions — by the time a PDF hits a GC’s desk it’s often the only reliable artifact left. The CAD source may not even be available.
That’s why we see vision becomes the more pragmatic path — not because it’s more precise than structured CAD parsing, but because PDFs are the actual lingua franca of construction. Every firm, every trade, every discipline hands off PDFs. So we made a bet on meeting the document where it actually lives.
On consistency and reproducibility — that’s a real challenge with vision models. Our approach is to keep detection scope narrow and validate confidence scores on every output rather than trying to generalize broadly. Happy to go deeper on that if useful.
As a part of our product development, we had fought with PDF so much, even we have a generic PDF parser with triple pipeline (One for single column, another for multi column and third for complex table based layouts) yet we are not getting 100% accuracy, I would say that it's bit risky to bet on PDF. PDF often is the most complex format ever made and it was never made for data extraction. And You are right that vision models are the only way but hallucination is real.