tabula-java | Extract tables from PDF files | Document Editor library

I reproduce this problem without setting PATH environment for java.exe. Make sure to set PATH for Java. See also: https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.xml

A PDF just contains instructions to place a character at an x,y coordinate on a 2-D plane, retaining no knowledge of words, sentences or tables.

Camelot uses PDFMiner under the hood to group characters into words and words into sentences. Sometimes when the characters are too close, PDFMiner can group characters belonging to different words into a single one.

Since the characters in your PDF table are placed very close, they are being merged into a single word and hence Camelot isn't able to detect the columns correctly. You can specify column separators to get the table out in this case. To get the x-coordinates of column separators you can check out the visual debugging guide. Additionally, you can specify split_text=True to cut the word along the column separators you've specified. Here's the code (I got the x-coordinates by creating a matplotlib plot of the text in the PDF using $ camelot stream -plot text m27.pdf):

Using CLI:

$ camelot --output m27.csv --format csv -split stream -C 72,95,209,327,442,529,566,606,683 m27.pdf

Using API:

You can specify the column coordinates using the -c or --columns parameter. The coordinates you specify will be the coordinates of the delineators between columns. So if one column goes from 10.5 to 13.5 and the next column goes from 13.5 to 17.5 then you only list 13.5. You will also need to turn guess off. You didn't provide an example pdf so I can't provide you with the correct coordinates but your command would look something like this: