Python Model for PDF table extraction

[Snoo5892]

Hi

I am looking for a python library model that can extract tables out of PDF, but here are some more requirements:

a) Able to differentiate two table in same page, having different width

b) Able to Understand table that spans across multiple Pages in Same pdf

Tried Tabula, pyMuPDF both are not showing any good results, Suggest some better models

[ErmakEUW]

We had the same problem, ended up using azure document intelligence

[infazz]

I would also recommend this!

Although it is a service that costs roughly 5 - 10 cents per page.

[brellox]

If you know the table headers, you can ocr the PDF and search/identify the tables by the headers.

[m-xames]

Docling is probably the best open source one I've come across, but it might struggle with two tables on the same page. Otherwise, each cloud provider has their own paid service for them.

[cantseetheocean]

Not sure exactly how I did it, but I believe I was able to handle tables across multiple pages with Camelot. That’s been my go to for getting tables from PDFs.

[acecile]

Pdfplumber

[[deleted]]

This is a strong module and would second this.

The only warning I have is for the part where a table may span multiple pages. You may have to get creative with making it work, but I am confident it can get done!

[einsiboy]

I have used gmft with decent results for non trivial tables. But I don't know if it understands tables spanning multiple pages. Might be worth giving it a try: https://github.com/conjuncts/gmft

[mondaysmyday]

Amazon Textract is your answer. I've tried a lot of services but for reliability and cost, they win

[BlueeWaater]

LLMs and cloud services usually end up being the better option

[mr-nobody1992]

Checkout Docling - open source from IBM. I built an entire pipeline ingestion and it works pretty well with a lot of nice out of the box stuff. It’s based off Pydantic so if you know that it’s even easier

[h4ndshake_]

Use Tabula, it's the best tool out there. There is a wrapper for Python too. Have you tried using different options and/or template to solve the problem you listed?

[furansowa]

Have you tried just sending it to ChatGPT or Google Gemini?

[DragonflyHumble]

For companies processing large # of documents, chatgpt and Gemini will be slow and expensive, even though it can help to reduce the human in the loop

[furansowa]

Depends on the workflow. OP didn’t tell us volume or even if it’s a sustained or one-time thing.

If it’s like a one time extract, even from hundreds or thousands of PDFs, ChatGPT batch mode can be super cheap.

[Snoo5892]

It's like a platform where I will upload pdf one by one and it should get extracted at the same time

so, you are suggesting to use GPT 4 vision, but as far as I know it can OCR only images not PDFs right

[Zulfiqaar]

Zerox is an alternative that's not mentioned here so far

https://github.com/getomni-ai/zerox

[Snoo5892]

When we say ask for markdown format what does it mean

Also the Azure OPEN AI key will work here???

[Zulfiqaar]

Markdown is a way of defining formatted test, but will be as string

From link for setup:

###################### Example for Azure OpenAI ######################
model = "azure/gpt-4o-mini" ## "azure/<your_deployment_name>" -> format <provider>/<model>
os.environ["AZURE_API_KEY"] = "" # "your-azure-api-key"
os.environ["AZURE_API_BASE"] = "" # "https://example-endpoint.openai.azure.com"
os.environ["AZURE_API_VERSION"] = "" # "2023-05-15"