Overview
pdfplumber is an open-source Python library built on top of pdfminer.six that provides access to low-level PDF objects (chars, lines, rects, images) and higher-level utilities for text extraction, table detection/extraction, and visual debugging. It is optimized for machine-generated PDFs rather than scanned documents.
Key features
- Fine-grained object access to characters, lines, rectangles, and their coordinates.
- Robust table extraction with configurable strategies and settings to handle diverse layouts.
- Visual debugging tools that render pages with overlays for detected tables and objects to aid tuning and development.
Use cases
- Extracting structured table data from machine-generated PDFs for ETL pipelines.
- Analyzing PDF layout and coordinates for downstream text processing and annotation extraction.
- Batch-processing large corpora of PDFs in scripting workflows and integrating into data pipelines.
Technical highlights
- Leverages
pdfminer.sixfor layout analysis and implements custom table-detection algorithms. - Offers both CLI and Python API usage with flexible parameters for advanced extraction scenarios.
- Well-documented repository with examples, notebooks, and active community maintenance.