For watermarked PDFs in RAG, standard OCR often fails. The key in 2026 is moving toward Multi-modal LLMs that can perform layout-aware extraction instead of raw text scraping. By treating the document as a visual entity first, you bypass the noise of the watermark. I’ve explored how these RAG-optimized architectures are becoming a core part of modern full-stack development, and it’s definitely the direction the industry is heading to solve these specific preprocessing bottlenecks