WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract
A set of tools for extracting tables from PDF files helping to do data mining on (OCR-processed) scanned documents. observed · 2026-08-28
Health v2 · maintenance only
32/100
- Activity 0
- Release rhythm 35
- Longevity 100
Flags: no_releases
How is this computed?
round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10) — computed 2026-09-02. Adoption (stars, forks) is never an input.
- gap_med: n/a
- age_days: 3708
- days_rel: n/a
- days_push: 1531
- n_releases_24m: 0
Adoption not part of the score
2255 stars · 368 forks observed · 2026-08-28
What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded
pdftabextract is a Python library of tools for extracting tabular data from OCR-processed scanned PDFs ('sandwich PDFs' containing scanned images plus recognized text). It detects table layouts, handles skewed or rotated pages, supports visual verification of detected structures, and exports the extracted tabular data, with per-document parameter tuning. Note: the README explicitly states the project is currently not maintained.
Use cases
- extract tables from scanned pdf documents
- parse tabular data from ocr-processed pdfs
- data mining on scanned historical documents
- extract tables from skewed or rotated pdf pages
- convert pdf table scans into structured data
- rescue table data when tabula or pdftotext fail
When to choose
- Your tables are in scanned 'sandwich PDFs' with OCR text layers (e.g. from tesseract or ABBYY Finereader)
- Pages are skewed, rotated, or have irregular table layouts that defeat pdftotext -layout or Tabula
- You need a programmatic, parameter-tunable Python toolkit rather than a one-click extractor
When to avoid
- Your PDFs are digitally born rather than scanned - use pdfplumber, camelot, or Tabula instead
- You need OCR itself - this is not OCR software and requires pre-OCR'd documents
- You expect automatic out-of-the-box extraction without adjusting parameters per document
- You need actively maintained software with support
Facets
library · maturity abandoned
pdf ocr parser image-processing pdf data-science files python cross-platform table-extraction ocr-pdfs scanned-documents sandwich-pdf data-mining tesseract deskewing table-structure-detection pdf2xml automation
5 sources
- readme: https://github.com/WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract · fetched 2026-08-28 · 906d9bce8ed5
- homepage: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2017/02/16/data-mining-ocr-pdfs-using-pdftabextract-to-liberate-tabular-data-from-scanned-documents/ · fetched 2026-08-29 · 4185c3593662
- site_page: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2022/03/07/some-thoughts-about-the-use-of-cloud-services-and-web-apis-in-social-science-research · fetched 2026-08-29 · 9aaff5db0e90
- registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/pdftabextract/json · fetched 2026-08-29 · fd771e960fb6
- site_page: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2016/06/14/welcome-to-the-wzb-data-science-blog · fetched 2026-08-29 · c679fb0aabc5
Member repositories
| Repository | Role | Health v2 |
|---|---|---|
| WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract | main | 32 |
For agents
markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract")
Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00 · Report a problem