A Deep Dive into the Microsoft Foundry Document Intelligence SDK: From PDF to Structured Data

Most “RAG over PDFs” pipelines have a step nobody talks about much: something has to turn a scanned invoice, a multi-column contract, or a photographed receipt into text a model can actually reason over. On Microsoft’s stack, that something is usually the Document Intelligence SDK, formerly Form Recognizer, and it’s worth understanding on its own terms rather than treating it as a black box that happens before the interesting part starts. This is a hands-on deep dive into that SDK specifically.