pdfexorcist

pdfexorcist pulls tables out of PDFs, scans and photos. Several independent engines read every page, and a value is kept only when most of them read it identically.

A cell the engines disagree on is left blank, never guessed, and listed for review with every engine’s reading.

To try it without installing anything, run it in your browser: the same five engines, on your own computer.

Quick start

From the command line

pip install pdfexorcist
pdfexorcist extract report.pdf

Reading report.pdf with 5 engines (a majority must agree)
  pdftotext   242 readings  0.0s
  pdfplumber  242 readings  0.1s
  pymupdf     242 readings  0.0s
  camelot     237 readings  0.3s
  pdfium      243 readings  0.0s

Agreed      242  99.6% of cells
Unresolved    1  engines disagreed: left blank, not guessed

Wrote report.csv (table layout, 48 rows).
Cells to review, with the reason and every engine's reading: report.review.csv

report.csv holds the agreed values as a grid:

page,label,0,1,2,3,4,5
1,1 Andhra Pradesh,119229,188997,179611,528.5,339.9,92.9
1,2 Arunachal Pradesh,2590,2244,2626,15.4,170.9,51.7
1,3 Assam,123512,111558,119883,351.6,341.0,38.2

In Python

from pdfexorcist import extract

cells = extract("report.pdf")
print(cells.status.value_counts().to_dict())
# {'verified': 242, 'unresolved': 1}

extract() returns one row per cell, with the agreed value, the votes behind it and a status.

How it works

1. Five text-layer engines read the PDF: pdftotext, pdfplumber, PyMuPDF, PDFium and camelot. For scans and photos, OCR engines read the pixels.

2. A parser turns each engine’s lines into keyed cells, such as (page, row, column). The same parser runs on every engine’s output.

3. In the vote, a cell is verified when a strict majority of engines, and at least 3, read the same value. Otherwise it is unresolved.

4. Your rules, such as “the total equals the sum of its parts”, run on the verified values. A value that breaks one is kept and flagged in the failed column.

What it does

• Command line: extract, inspect, engines, show, compare and recipe.

• Python library: extract(), vote(), parsers, checks, your own engines.

• Recipes: save the settings for one kind of table in a TOML file.

• Engines: which engines exist, what they read, and how the vote counts them.

• See what it extracts: a page with a box on every cell, and the engines side by side.

• Reference: every public function.