pdfplumber

Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each text character, rectangle, and line. Plus: Table extraction and visual debugging.

Works best on machine-generated, rather than scanned, PDFs. Built on pdfminer.six.

Currently tested on Python 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8.

Note: pdfplumber v0.5.22 was the final version to support Python 3.5.

Installation
Command line interface
Python library
Visual debugging
Extracting tables
Extracting form values
Demonstrations
Comparison to other libraries
Acknowledgments / Contributors
Contributing

Installation

pip install pdfplumber

Command line interface

Basic example

curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/stable/examples/pdfs/background-checks.pdf" > background-checks.pdf
pdfplumber < background-checks.pdf > background-checks.csv

The output will be a CSV containing info about every character, line, and rectangle in the PDF.

Options

Argument	Description
`--format [format]`	`csv` or `json`. The `json` format returns more information; it includes PDF-level and page-level metadata, plus dictionary-nested attributes.
`--pages [list of pages]`	A space-delimited, `1`-indexed list of pages or hyphenated page ranges. E.g., `1, 11-15`, which would return data for pages 1, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15.
`--types [list of object types to extract]`	Choices are `char`, `rect`, `line`, `curve`, `image`, `annot`. Defaults to all.

Python library

Basic example

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("path/to/file.pdf") as pdf:
    first_page = pdf.pages[0]
    print(first_page.chars[0])

Loading a PDF

To start working with a PDF, call pdfplumber.open(x), where x can be a:

path to your PDF file
file object, loaded as bytes
file-like object, loaded as bytes

The open method returns an instance of the pdfplumber.PDF class.

To load a password-protected PDF, pass the password keyword argument, e.g., pdfplumber.open("file.pdf", password = "test").

Invalid metadata values are treated as a warning by default. If that is not intended, pass strict_metadata=True to the open method and pdfplumber.open will raise an exception if it is unable to parse the metadata.

The `pdfplumber.PDF` class

The top-level pdfplumber.PDF class represents a single PDF and has two main properties:

Property	Description
`.metadata`	A dictionary of metadata key/value pairs, drawn from the PDF's `Info` trailers. Typically includes "CreationDate," "ModDate," "Producer," et cetera.
`.pages`	A list containing one `pdfplumber.Page` instance per page loaded.

The `pdfplumber.Page` class

The pdfplumber.Page class is at the core of pdfplumber. Most things you'll do with pdfplumber will revolve around this class. It has these main properties:

Property	Description
`.page_number`	The sequential page number, starting with `1` for the first page, `2` for the second, and so on.
`.width`	The page's width.
`.height`	The page's height.
`.objects` / `.chars` / `.lines` / `.rects` / `.curves` / `.images`	Each of these properties is a list, and each list contains one dictionary for each such object embedded on the page. For more detail, see "Objects" below.

... and these main methods:

Method	Description
`.crop(bounding_box, relative=False)`	Returns a version of the page cropped to the bounding box, which should be expressed as 4-tuple with the values `(x0, top, x1, bottom)`. Cropped pages retain objects that fall at least partly within the bounding box. If an object falls only partly within the box, its dimensions are sliced to fit the bounding box. If `relative=True`, the bounding box is calculated as an offset from the top-left of the page's bounding box, rather than an absolute positioning. (See Issue #245 for a visual example and explanation.)
`.within_bbox(bounding_box, relative=False)`	Similar to `.crop`, but only retains objects that fall entirely within the bounding box.
`.filter(test_function)`	Returns a version of the page with only the `.objects` for which `test_function(obj)` returns `True`.
`.dedupe_chars(tolerance=1)`	Returns a version of the page with duplicate chars — those sharing the same text, fontname, size, and positioning (within `tolerance` x/y) as other characters — removed. (See Issue #71 to understand the motivation.)
`.extract_text(x_tolerance=3, y_tolerance=3)`	Collates all of the page's character objects into a single string. Adds spaces where the difference between the `x1` of one character and the `x0` of the next is greater than `x_tolerance`. Adds newline characters where the difference between the `doctop` of one character and the `doctop` of the next is greater than `y_tolerance`.
`.extract_words(x_tolerance=3, y_tolerance=3, keep_blank_chars=False, use_text_flow=False, horizontal_ltr=True, vertical_ttb=True, extra_attrs=[])`	Returns a list of all word-looking things and their bounding boxes. Words are considered to be sequences of characters where (for "upright" characters) the difference between the `x1` of one character and the `x0` of the next is less than or equal to `x_tolerance` and where the `doctop` of one character and the `doctop` of the next is less than or equal to `y_tolerance`. A similar approach is taken for non-upright characters, but instead measuring the vertical, rather than horizontal, distances between them. The parameters `horizontal_ltr` and `vertical_ttb` indicate whether the words should be read from left-to-right (for horizontal words) / top-to-bottom (for vertical words). Changing `keep_blank_chars` to `True` will mean that blank characters are treated as part of a word, not as a space between words. Changing `use_text_flow` to `True` will use the PDF's underlying flow of characters as a guide for ordering and segmenting the words, rather than presorting the characters by x/y position. (This mimics how dragging a cursor highlights text in a PDF; as with that, the order does not always appear to be logical.) Passing a list of `extra_attrs` (e.g., `["fontname", "size"]` will restrict each words to characters that share exactly the same value for each of those attributes, and the resulting word dicts will indicate those attributes.
`.extract_tables(table_settings)`	Extracts tabular data from the page. For more details see "Extracting tables" below.
`.to_image(**conversion_kwargs)`	Returns an instance of the `PageImage` class. For more details, see "Visual debugging" below. For conversion_kwargs, see here.

Objects

Each instance of pdfplumber.PDF and pdfplumber.Page provides access to four types of PDF objects. The following properties each return a Python list of the matching objects:

.chars, each representing a single text character.
.lines, each representing a single 1-dimensional line.
.rects, each representing a single 2-dimensional rectangle.
.curves, each representing a series of connected points.
.images, each representing an image.
.annots, each representing a single PDF annotation (cf. Section 8.4 of the official PDF specification for details)
.hyperlinks, each representing a single PDF annotation of the subtype Link and having an URI action attribute

Each object is represented as a simple Python dict, with the following properties:

`char` properties

Property	Description
`page_number`	Page number on which this character was found.
`text`	E.g., "z", or "Z" or " ".
`fontname`	Name of the character's font face.
`size`	Font size.
`adv`	Equal to text width * the font size * scaling factor.
`upright`	Whether the character is upright.
`height`	Height of the character.
`width`	Width of the character.
`x0`	Distance of left side of character from left side of page.
`x1`	Distance of right side of character from left side of page.
`y0`	Distance of bottom of character from bottom of page.
`y1`	Distance of top of character from bottom of page.
`top`	Distance of top of character from top of page.
`bottom`	Distance of bottom of the character from top of page.
`doctop`	Distance of top of character from top of document.
`object_type`	"char"

`line` properties

Property	Description
`page_number`	Page number on which this line was found.
`height`	Height of line.
`width`	Width of line.
`x0`	Distance of left-side extremity from left side of page.
`x1`	Distance of right-side extremity from left side of page.
`y0`	Distance of bottom extremity from bottom of page.
`y1`	Distance of top extremity bottom of page.
`top`	Distance of top of line from top of page.
`bottom`	Distance of bottom of the line from top of page.
`doctop`	Distance of top of line from top of document.
`linewidth`	Thickness of line.
`object_type`	"line"

`rect` properties

Property	Description
`page_number`	Page number on which this rectangle was found.
`height`	Height of rectangle.
`width`	Width of rectangle.
`x0`	Distance of left side of rectangle from left side of page.
`x1`	Distance of right side of rectangle from left side of page.
`y0`	Distance of bottom of rectangle from bottom of page.
`y1`	Distance of top of rectangle from bottom of page.
`top`	Distance of top of rectangle from top of page.
`bottom`	Distance of bottom of the rectangle from top of page.
`doctop`	Distance of top of rectangle from top of document.
`linewidth`	Thickness of line.
`object_type`	"rect"

`curve` properties

Property	Description
`page_number`	Page number on which this curve was found.
`points`	Points — as a list of `(x, top)` tuples — describing the curve.
`height`	Height of curve's bounding box.
`width`	Width of curve's bounding box.
`x0`	Distance of curve's left-most point from left side of page.
`x1`	Distance of curve's right-most point from left side of the page.
`y0`	Distance of curve's lowest point from bottom of page.
`y1`	Distance of curve's highest point from bottom of page.
`top`	Distance of curve's highest point from top of page.
`bottom`	Distance of curve's lowest point from top of page.
`doctop`	Distance of curve's highest point from top of document.
`linewidth`	Thickness of line.
`object_type`	"curve"

Additionally, both pdfplumber.PDF and pdfplumber.Page provide access to two derived lists of objects: .rect_edges (which decomposes each rectangle into its four lines) and .edges (which combines .rect_edges with .lines).

`image` properties

[To be completed.]

Visual debugging

Note: To use pdfplumber's visual-debugging tools, you'll also need to have two additional pieces of software installed on your computer:

ImageMagick. Installation instructions here.
ghostscript. Installation instructions here, or simply apt install ghostscript (Ubuntu) / brew install ghostscript (Mac).

Creating a `PageImage` with `.to_image()`

To turn any page (including cropped pages) into an PageImage object, call my_page.to_image(). You can optionally pass a resolution={integer} keyword argument, which defaults to 72. E.g.:

im = my_pdf.pages[0].to_image(resolution=150)

PageImage objects play nicely with IPython/Jupyter notebooks; they automatically render as cell outputs. For example:

Basic `PageImage` methods

Method	Description
`im.reset()`	Clears anything you've drawn so far.
`im.copy()`	Copies the image to a new `PageImage` object.
`im.save(path_or_fileobject, format="PNG")`	Saves the annotated image.

Drawing methods

You can pass explicit coordinates or any pdfplumber PDF object (e.g., char, line, rect) to these methods.

Single-object method	Bulk method	Description
`im.draw_line(line, stroke={color}, stroke_width=1)`	`im.draw_lines(list_of_lines, **kwargs)`	Draws a line from a `line`, `curve`, or a 2-tuple of 2-tuples (e.g., `((x, y), (x, y))`).
`im.draw_vline(location, stroke={color}, stroke_width=1)`	`im.draw_vlines(list_of_locations, **kwargs)`	Draws a vertical line at the x-coordinate indicated by `location`.
`im.draw_hline(location, stroke={color}, stroke_width=1)`	`im.draw_hlines(list_of_locations, **kwargs)`	Draws a horizontal line at the y-coordinate indicated by `location`.
`im.draw_rect(bbox_or_obj, fill={color}, stroke={color}, stroke_width=1)`	`im.draw_rects(list_of_rects, **kwargs)`	Draws a rectangle from a `rect`, `char`, etc., or 4-tuple bounding box.
`im.draw_circle(center_or_obj, radius=5, fill={color}, stroke={color})`	`im.draw_circles(list_of_circles, **kwargs)`	Draws a circle at `(x, y)` coordinate or at the center of a `char`, `rect`, etc.

Note: The methods above are built on Pillow's ImageDraw methods, but the parameters have been tweaked for consistency with SVG's fill/stroke/stroke_width nomenclature.

Troubleshooting ImageMagick on Debian-based systems

If you're using pdfplumber on a Debian-based system and encounter a PolicyError, you may be able to fix it by changing the following line in /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml from this:

<policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" />

... to this:

<policy domain="coder" rights="read|write" pattern="PDF" />

(More details about policy.xml available here.)

Extracting tables

pdfplumber's approach to table detection borrows heavily from Anssi Nurminen's master's thesis, and is inspired by Tabula. It works like this:

For any given PDF page, find the lines that are (a) explicitly defined and/or (b) implied by the alignment of words on the page.
Merge overlapping, or nearly-overlapping, lines.
Find the intersections of all those lines.
Find the most granular set of rectangles (i.e., cells) that use these intersections as their vertices.
Group contiguous cells into tables.

Table-extraction methods

pdfplumber.Page objects can call the following table methods:

Method	Description
`.find_tables(table_settings={})`	Returns a list of `Table` objects. The `Table` object provides access to the `.cells`, `.rows`, and `.bbox` properties, as well as the `.extract(x_tolerance=3, y_tolerance=3)` method.
`.extract_tables(table_settings={})`	Returns the text extracted from all tables found on the page, represented as a list of lists of lists, with the structure `table -> row -> cell`.
`.extract_table(table_settings={})`	Returns the text extracted from the largest table on the page, represented as a list of lists, with the structure `row -> cell`. (If multiple tables have the same size — as measured by the number of cells — this method returns the table closest to the top of the page.)
`.debug_tablefinder(table_settings={})`	Returns an instance of the `TableFinder` class, with access to the `.edges`, `.intersections`, `.cells`, and `.tables` properties.

For example:

pdf = pdfplumber.open("path/to/my.pdf")
page = pdf.pages[0]
page.extract_table()

Click here for a more detailed example.

Table-extraction settings

By default, extract_tables uses the page's vertical and horizontal lines (or rectangle edges) as cell-separators. But the method is highly customizable via the table_settings argument. The possible settings, and their defaults:

{
    "vertical_strategy": "lines", 
    "horizontal_strategy": "lines",
    "explicit_vertical_lines": [],
    "explicit_horizontal_lines": [],
    "snap_tolerance": 3,
    "join_tolerance": 3,
    "edge_min_length": 3,
    "min_words_vertical": 3,
    "min_words_horizontal": 1,
    "keep_blank_chars": False,
    "text_tolerance": 3,
    "text_x_tolerance": None,
    "text_y_tolerance": None,
    "intersection_tolerance": 3,
    "intersection_x_tolerance": None,
    "intersection_y_tolerance": None,
}

Setting	Description
`"vertical_strategy"`	Either `"lines"`, `"lines_strict"`, `"text"`, or `"explicit"`. See explanation below.
`"horizontal_strategy"`	Either `"lines"`, `"lines_strict"`, `"text"`, or `"explicit"`. See explanation below.
`"explicit_vertical_lines"`	A list of vertical lines that explicitly demarcate cells in the table. Can be used in combination with any of the strategies above. Items in the list should be either numbers — indicating the `x` coordinate of a line the full height of the page — or `line`/`rect`/`curve` objects.
`"explicit_horizontal_lines"`	A list of horizontal lines that explicitly demarcate cells in the table. Can be used in combination with any of the strategies above. Items in the list should be either numbers — indicating the `y` coordinate of a line the full height of the page — or `line`/`rect`/`curve` objects.
`"snap_tolerance"`	Parallel lines within `snap_tolerance` pixels will be "snapped" to the same horizontal or vertical position.
`"join_tolerance"`	Line segments on the same infinite line, and whose ends are within `join_tolerance` of one another, will be "joined" into a single line segment.
`"edge_min_length"`	Edges shorter than `edge_min_length` will be discarded before attempting to reconstruct the table.
`"min_words_vertical"`	When using `"vertical_strategy": "text"`, at least `min_words_vertical` words must share the same alignment.
`"min_words_horizontal"`	When using `"horizontal_strategy": "text"`, at least `min_words_horizontal` words must share the same alignment.
`"keep_blank_chars"`	When using the `text` strategy, consider `" "` chars to be parts of words and not word-separators.
`"text_tolerance"`, `"text_x_tolerance"`, `"text_y_tolerance"`	When the `text` strategy searches for words, it will expect the individual letters in each word to be no more than `text_tolerance` pixels apart.
`"intersection_tolerance"`, `"intersection_x_tolerance"`, `"intersection_y_tolerance"`	When combining edges into cells, orthogonal edges must be within `intersection_tolerance` pixels to be considered intersecting.

Table-extraction strategies

Both vertical_strategy and horizontal_strategy accept the following options:

Strategy	Description
`"lines"`	Use the page's graphical lines — including the sides of rectangle objects — as the borders of potential table-cells.
`"lines_strict"`	Use the page's graphical lines — but not the sides of rectangle objects — as the borders of potential table-cells.
`"text"`	For `vertical_strategy`: Deduce the (imaginary) lines that connect the left, right, or center of words on the page, and use those lines as the borders of potential table-cells. For `horizontal_strategy`, the same but using the tops of words.
`"explicit"`	Only use the lines explicitly defined in `explicit_vertical_lines` / `explicit_horizontal_lines`.

Notes

Often it's helpful to crop a page — Page.crop(bounding_box) — before trying to extract the table.
Table extraction for pdfplumber was radically redesigned for v0.5.0, and introduced breaking changes.

Extracting form values

Sometimes PDF files can contain forms that include inputs that people can fill out and save. While values in form fields appear like other text in a PDF file, form data is handled differently. If you want the gory details, see page 671 of this specification.

pdfplumber doesn't have an interface for working with form data, but you can access it using pdfplumber's wrappers around pdfminer.

For example, this snippet will retrieve form field names and values and store them in a dictionary. You may have to modify this script to handle cases like nested fields (see page 676 of the specification).

pdf = pdfplumber.open("document_with_form.pdf")

fields = pdf.doc.catalog["AcroForm"].resolve()["Fields"]

form_data = {}

for field in fields:
    field_name = field.resolve()["T"]
    field_value = field.resolve()["V"]
    form_data[field_name] = field_value

Demonstrations

Using extract_table on a California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) report. Demonstrates basic visual debugging and table extraction.
Using extract_table on the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System PDFs. Demonstrates how to use visual debugging to find optimal table extraction settings. Also demonstrates Page.crop(...) and Page.extract_text(...).
Inspecting and visualizing curve objects.
Extracting fixed-width data from a San Jose PD firearm search report, an example of using Page.extract_text(...).

Comparison to other libraries

Several other Python libraries help users to extract information from PDFs. As a broad overview, pdfplumber distinguishes itself from other PDF processing libraries by combining these features:

Easy access to detailed information about each PDF object
Higher-level, customizable methods for extracting text and tables
Tightly integrated visual debugging
Other useful utility functions, such as filtering objects via a crop-box

It's also helpful to know what features pdfplumber does not provide:

PDF generation
PDF modification
Optical character recognition (OCR)
Strong support for extracting tables from OCR'ed documents

Specific comparisons

pdfminer.six provides the foundation for pdfplumber. It primarily focuses on parsing PDFs, analyzing PDF layouts and object positioning, and extracting text. It does not provide tools for table extraction or visual debugging.
pymupdf is substantially faster than pdfminer.six (and thus also pdfplumber) and can generate and modify PDFs, but the library requires installation of non-Python software (MuPDF). It also does not enable easy access to shape objects (rectangles, lines, etc.), and does not provide table-extraction or visual debugging tools.
camelot, tabula-py, and pdftables all focus primarily on extracting tables. In some cases, they may be better suited to the particular tables you are trying to extract.
PyPDF2 and its successor libraries appear no longer to be maintained.

Acknowledgments / Contributors

Many thanks to the following users who've contributed ideas, features, and fixes:

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome, but please submit a proposal issue first, as the library is in active development.

Current maintainers:

BeyondYourself/pdfplumber

pdfplumber

Table of Contents

Installation

Command line interface

Basic example

Options

Python library

Basic example

Loading a PDF

The `pdfplumber.PDF` class

The `pdfplumber.Page` class

Objects

`char` properties

`line` properties

`rect` properties

`curve` properties

`image` properties

Visual debugging

Creating a `PageImage` with `.to_image()`

Basic `PageImage` methods

Drawing methods

Troubleshooting ImageMagick on Debian-based systems

Extracting tables

Table-extraction methods

Table-extraction settings

Table-extraction strategies

Notes

Extracting form values

Demonstrations

Comparison to other libraries

Specific comparisons

Acknowledgments / Contributors

Contributing

BeyondYourself/pdfplumber

pdfplumber

Table of Contents

Installation

Command line interface

Basic example

Options

Python library

Basic example

Loading a PDF

The pdfplumber.PDF class

The pdfplumber.Page class

Objects

char properties

line properties

rect properties

curve properties

image properties

Visual debugging

Creating a PageImage with .to_image()

Basic PageImage methods

Drawing methods

Troubleshooting ImageMagick on Debian-based systems

Extracting tables

Table-extraction methods

Table-extraction settings

Table-extraction strategies

Notes

Extracting form values

Demonstrations

Comparison to other libraries

Specific comparisons

Acknowledgments / Contributors

Contributing

The `pdfplumber.PDF` class

The `pdfplumber.Page` class

`char` properties

`line` properties

`rect` properties

`curve` properties

`image` properties

Creating a `PageImage` with `.to_image()`

Basic `PageImage` methods