How can I extract text from a table in a PDF file?

Question

I am trying to implement an algorithm described in an academic paper, which I have in PDF format. The algorithm includes a table of 256 entries that I want to copy to my implementation. However, I can't seem to copy the table as text that I can manipulate. I can only copy it as an image.

How can I extract the table easily without typing it in?

Answer 1

PDF2Table

This gives it out to XML I think.

If we surf the web we can find PDF files in heaps. Once technical details of an amazing five mega pixel digital camera, once a statistic about the last two years incomes of an enterprise, and once a brilliant crime novel of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is saved in a PDF file. The widespread use of this file format takes the focus on the question of how to reuse the data in such a file. Many things are already done in this area. For example, there are several tools that convert PDF-files to other formats.

My work focuses only on the extraction of table information from PDF-files. I searched for tools that extract basic information from PDF-files. I found a tool named pdf2html which also returns data in XML format. To access this XML output I used the JDOM archive.

I developed several heuristics for table detection and decomposition. These heuristics work pretty good on lucid tables (without spanning columns or rows) and fairly good on complex tables (with spanning rows or columns).

Sourceforge link

Answer 2

Your problem might be that it was pasted into the pdf as an image by the origional author. If this is the case (you could find out by seeing if other text in the document will copy as text) your only options are probably to copy it by hand (hope you can touch type) or use OCR software that comes with scanners.

Answer 3

The non-free application PDF2XL and the free PDF Mechanic can both extract tabular data to CSV and Excel often perfectly depending on the exact formatting of the table.