I have a PDF document.
It contains data in tabular format. I want to extract the data into a comma delimited text file using the comma as column delimiters.
Any suggestions?
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1have you tried anything like exploring some APIs? – Abubakkar Apr 15 '15 at 07:39
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Hello. Like which API?. I am eager to learn how to use it. – user3079559 Apr 15 '15 at 07:40
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You can try Apache Tika. Apache Tika is basically a toolkit that extracts data from many types of documents, including PDFs. Or you can explore more like itextpdf, etc. – Abubakkar Apr 15 '15 at 07:42
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Let me try itextpdf. – user3079559 Apr 15 '15 at 07:50
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You may try Algodocs: https://algodocs.com. It works perfectly for PDFs with tables that even span to hundreds of pages. – Zhavat Feb 10 '21 at 23:21
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Standard PDFs do not provide any hints about the semantics of what they draw on a page: the only distinction that the syntax provides is the distinctions between vector elements (lines, fills,...), images and text.
Whether any character is part of a table or part of a line or just a lonely, single character within an otherwise empty area is not easy to recognize programmatically by parsing the PDF source code.
For a background about why the PDF file format should never, ever be thought of as suitable for hosting extractable, structured data, see this article:
Why Updating Dollars for Docs Was So Difficult (ProPublica-Website)
Having said the above now let me add this:
For an amazing open source family of tools that gets better and better from week to week for extracting tabular data from PDFs (unless they are scanned pages) -- contradicting what I said in my introductionary paragraphs! -- check out TabulaPDF. See these links:
Tabula is written in Ruby.
Update
Here is an ASCiinema screencast (which you also can download and re-play locally in your Linux/MacOSX/Unix terminal with the help of the asciinema command line tool), starring tabula-extractor:
Kurt Pfeifle
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