See what it extracts¶

show draws one page with a box on every cell the vote produced. A shifted column or a skipped row is visible at a glance.

pdfexorcist show mccd_2014.pdf --recipe examples/mccd/table4.toml

Agreed             693  boxed solid
Unresolved          99  dashed, dotted fill
Failed checks        0  thick, hatched
Not read as cells  259  words outlined in grey
Wrote mccd_2014.p1.show.html
Open it in a browser (or add --open); it works offline.

The HTML file is self-contained and has three views. The screenshots below are of this file: tests/fixtures/mccd/mccd_2014.pdf, the MCCD Table 4 recipe, five text engines.

Page¶

The Page view: a table page with green boxes on agreed values and orange dashed boxes on unresolved cells

Box	Meaning
green, solid	agreed value
orange, dashed with dots	unresolved: the engines disagreed
vermillion, hatched	agreed, but fails a check
grey, dotted	text that did not become a cell (titles, labels, notes)

Row names run down the left margin and column names along the top; here the recipe names each column by its State. Hover or click a cell, or use the arrow keys, to see its key, the agreed value and every engine’s reading. U jumps to the next unresolved cell.

The orange bands at each cause’s T row are camelot’s: it slips a row in these blocks and files the T values under a row with no cause code. No other engine reads a cell with that key, so they stay unresolved. The other four engines still agree on the real T cells, which are kept.

Compare engines¶

The Compare engines view: one panel per engine, each showing that engine's own readings

One panel per engine, with its own readings before the vote. Zoom and scroll move every panel together. A reading that differs from the agreed value is hatched, with the engine’s value printed above it. The header of each panel counts how many of its readings differ from the vote.

compare opens the same file on this view:

pdfexorcist compare mccd_2014.pdf --recipe examples/mccd/table4.toml

Grid¶

The Grid view: one row per cell, one column per engine

One row per cell, one column per engine. Sort by any column, search by key, value or label, and filter for disagreements, unresolved, failed or unplaced cells. Here camelot has no reading for septicaemia’s F row, and its T row holds the F values (≠2390 where the others read 5632).

Photos¶

A photographed page is shown levelled, as the OCR engines read it:

pdfexorcist show tests/fixtures/bmc/2026-07-28.jpg --recipe examples/lake_photo/recipe.toml

The Page view of a photographed lake-level table, with green boxes on the agreed values

A static picture¶

--png also writes an annotated PNG, and -o page.png writes only the PNG. Use it in a report or an issue.

pdfexorcist show mccd_2014.pdf --recipe examples/mccd/table4.toml --png

The static PNG: the same boxes drawn on the page

Where the boxes come from¶

Positions come from the engines that report them: pdfplumber, PyMuPDF, PDFium, camelot, Tesseract, PaddleOCR and Apple Vision. pdftotext, Chandra and GLM-OCR give none, so their readings borrow the other engines’ box, drawn dashed in Compare engines.

A parser need not return positions. pdfexorcist finds each value among its engine’s words, in reading order. In Python, extract(..., return_readings=True) returns the same positions; see Where each value sits.