PDF Tables

Detect & extract tables as structure (pdf-tables)

Detect & extract tables as structure

Part of the Universal PDF Management & Creation Skill Repository. Category: PDF Management. Every skill is individually callable (INDIVIDUAL MODE) and may also be invoked automatically by the orchestrator (SYSTEM MODE).

When to use

Preserve tables as rows/columns instead of flattening to text.

Operations

• extract tables
• header/rows reconstruction
• multi-page tables
• to CSV
• to XLSX
• to JSON
• to Markdown
• column-consistency validation

Engine (what actually executes this)

universal_pdf/core.tables:extract_tables / tables_to_csv / tables_to_xlsx / tables_to_json / tables_to_markdown / validate_tables

All heavy lifting is done on disk / one page at a time by the shared engine — never by loading the document into an LLM context.

Tools & graceful degradation

• Preferred tool: pdfplumber layout extraction
• Fallback: PyMuPDF find_tables

If the preferred backend is unavailable the skill transparently uses the fallback or reports a documented limitation. It never reports success when an operation did not actually happen.

Validation (this skill attaches checks to its Outcome)

extracted>0; each export written; column consistency

Related skills

pdf-extract, pdf-export, pdf-provenance, pdf-orchestrate

Example requests it handles

• "Extract every table and export to Excel."
• "Turn these PDF tables into CSV."

Notes

Provenance: outputs cite their source page/section where relevant.