What PDF is
PDF describes a page: glyphs at coordinates, not rows and columns. A table in a PDF is a visual arrangement, not a data structure.
Reports, invoices, statements and anything sent to be read rather than processed.
What Qlik is
A Qlik load script block using LOAD INLINE, which embeds the data in the script itself.
QlikView and Qlik Sense developers.
What changes when you convert PDF to Qlik
Every character in a text-based PDF carries its position on the page. Characters sharing a baseline are one row. Columns are found from the vertical strips no character ever occupies, which is why extraction works cleanly on a document laid out with spacing and badly on one laid out with ruled lines. A header repeated at the top of each page is detected and dropped rather than landing in the middle of the data.
Suitable for small reference tables. For anything large, load from a file instead.
What carries over from PDF to Qlik
PDF records 2 things about a table that Qlik has no way to hold.
Qlik wants a type for each column, and PDF does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in Qlik, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Qlik marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.
Anything visual in the PDF - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Qlik and is dropped. The values are what survives.
This is the direction that recovers structure: PDF has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.