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I love used tabula and recommend Camelot over it. The Camelot folks even put together a head to head comparison page (on their website) that shows their results consistently coming out ahead of Tabula.

My other complaint with Tabula is total lack of metadata. It’s impossible to know even what page of the PDF the tables are located on! You either have to extract one page at a time or you just get a data frame with no idea which table is located on which page.

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The best I've used is PDFPlumber. Camelot lists it on its comparison page[1] but I've had better results.

Both are better than Tabula though.

[1] https://github.com/camelot-dev/camelot/wiki/Comparison-with-...

Thanks - I cannot get Camelot to run in parallel (I use celery workers to process PDFs), there is some bug in Ghostscript that SEGFAULTS. I’ll try using PDFPlumber instead! By the way Apache Tika has been the best for basic text extraction - even outputs to HTML which is neat.

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