PDF Extractor

pdf-extractor

What it does

pdf-extractor extracts structured content from PDF documents. It supports:

• Text extraction — per-page plain text output (Markdown format).
• Table extraction — detects and extracts tabular data into CSV files, one per page per table.
• Image extraction (optional) — converts PDF pages to images via pdf2image and applies OCR using tesseract.

The tool is designed for batch and automated workflows: it runs from the command line, accepts a single input PDF, and writes all output to a configurable directory.

When to use

Use pdf-extractor when you need to:

• Programmatically extract text from PDF invoices, reports, or articles.
• Convert tabular PDF data into machine-readable CSV files.
• OCR scanned documents (requires tesseract installed separately).
• Build an automated document-processing pipeline.

Do not use pdf-extractor when:

• You need interactive PDF editing or form filling.
• The PDF contains only vector graphics with no text layer (consider a dedicated OCR tool).
• You require extraction of embedded file attachments or annotations.

How to use

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• pip dependencies (see requirements.txt)

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

For OCR support, you also need tesseract on your system:

• Ubuntu/Debian: sudo apt-get install -y tesseract-ocr
• macOS (Homebrew): brew install tesseract
• Windows: Download from GitHub UB-Mannheim/tesseract

Basic usage

Extract text and tables from a PDF:

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py --input document.pdf

This creates a directory document_extracted/ containing:

• page-1.md, page-2.md, … — extracted text per page
• page-1-table-1.csv, … — extracted tables per page

OCR mode

Convert pages to images and run OCR (requires tesseract):

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py --input document.pdf --ocr

Custom output directory

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py --input document.pdf --output-dir /tmp/my_extract

Examples

Extract a quarterly report

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py \
  --input quarterly-report.pdf \
  --output-dir ./q1-2025-extracted

Expected output:

q1-2025-extracted/
├── page-1.md
├── page-1-table-1.csv
├── page-2.md
├── page-3.md
└── page-3-table-1.csv

OCR a scanned contract

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py \
  --input scanned-contract.pdf \
  --ocr

When --ocr is enabled, the script first attempts to extract text natively with pdfplumber. If a page has no extractable text, it falls back to OCR. If tesseract is not installed, the script prints a warning and continues without OCR.

Check exit codes

python scripts/pdf_extractor.py --input missing.pdf
echo $?   # non-zero: error message written to stderr

Configuration

Exit codes