# WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract

A set of tools for extracting tables from PDF files helping to do data mining on (OCR-processed) scanned documents.

Repository: https://github.com/WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/pdftabextract
Homepage: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2017/02/16/data-mining-ocr-pdfs-using-pdftabextract-to-liberate-tabular-data-from-scanned-documents/
Language: Python
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: pdf, data-mining, python, image-processing, tables, ocr
Last push: 2022-06-24T09:51:22+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3708, "days_push": 1531, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 2255, forks 368 (observed 2026-08-28T04:06:31.320059+00:00)

## What it is
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- data mining on scanned historical documents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
- artifact type: library
- maturity: abandoned
- function: pdf, ocr, parser, image-processing
- domain: pdf, data-science, files
- platform: python, cross-platform
- tags: table-extraction, ocr-pdfs, scanned-documents, sandwich-pdf, data-mining, tesseract, deskewing, table-structure-detection, pdf2xml, automation

## Member repositories
- WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:31.320059+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T02:43:44.684341+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract (fetched 2026-08-28T04:06:31.320059+00:00, sha 906d9bce8ed5)
  - homepage: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2017/02/16/data-mining-ocr-pdfs-using-pdftabextract-to-liberate-tabular-data-from-scanned-documents/ (fetched 2026-08-29T10:24:00.528612+00:00, sha 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 2026-08-29T10:24:00.534126+00:00, sha 9aaff5db0e90)
  - registry_pypi: https://pypi.org/pypi/pdftabextract/json (fetched 2026-08-29T10:24:00.536168+00:00, sha fd771e960fb6)
  - site_page: https://datascience.blog.wzb.eu/2016/06/14/welcome-to-the-wzb-data-science-blog (fetched 2026-08-29T10:24:00.532317+00:00, sha c679fb0aabc5)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.