Column inferencer based on generated border pieces and column borders

A method for processing an electronic document (ED) to infer columns in the ED, where the ED comprises a plurality of characters. The method includes generating a mark-up version of the ED having text-layout attributes of the characters in the ED, where the characters are grouped into paragraphs based on the text-layout attributes, and each paragraph corresponds to a paragraph bounding box surrounding a corresponding paragraph, generating border pieces by initiating a pair of left scan and right scan from each paragraph bounding box to identify any adjacent paragraph bounding box, and generating, based at least on the border pieces, column borders for use in inferring the columns in the ED, where at least one column has a vertically aligned portion of the paragraphs.