SAsaikatsg·Aug 6, 2026Submission
Plumb a PDF for detailed information
3 points · Open discussionjsvine
pdfplumber
Python2016–2026
jsvine / pdfplumber
pdfplumber
Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each char, rectangle, line, et cetera — and easily extract text and tables.
8Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Plumb a PDF for detailed information about each char, rectangle, line, et cetera — and easily extract text and tables.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-03-24 20:23:34 UTC to 2026-08-06 18:42:21 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesIn the same vein, I'm building a tool [1] to extract tables from PDFs (no OCR yet) and spreadsheets. The end goal is to make it easy to combine data from multiple sources by joining tables and produce some useful reports out of it.
The PDF parsing is done by the excellent PDFplumber Python library [2], the web app is built with Elixir's Phoenix framework and it is all hosted on Fly.io.
[1] https://data-tools.fly.dev
[2] https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
In Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in the browserI use a combination of Zotero, Locally Linked PDFs/Folder Structure, and SumatraPDFs (Comments etc.):
folders:
- for every literature search, create a folder with date and name
- e.g. 2024-03-21_Quantum_Entanglement
- use CTRL-SHIFT-DRAG to drop files into Zotero as Links, see [#77](https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/77)
- You _can_ organize in Zotero, but you don't have to. Files can be linked
to multiple Zotero folders (simply copy library entries in Zotero)
- sync literature folder and zotero database with nextcloud to somewhere, for backup
zotero:
- disable sync
- set “Base directory” (Preferences > Advanced > Files and Folders) to local literature folder
- set PDF View to “System default” (Preferences > General > “Open PDFs using.
Read the rest
.”)
- Enable recursive quick search in folders: go to Preferences > Advanced > Config Editor, search for `recursiveCollections`, double click (set to True)
- use CTRL-Shift-C to copy bibliography to clipboard
- Dark Theme:
- https://github.com/Rosmaninho/Zotero-Dark-Theme
- Go to `%AppData%\Zotero\Zotero\Profiles\` (`XXXXXXXX.default`)
- Create `chrome` folder
- Place the `userChrome.css`
- Start Zotero
- Add-Ons:
- zotero-pdfkit
- https://github.com/sharpevo/zotero-pdfkit/
- allows to modify/select a “default” PDF attachment to be opened
- ZoteroDuplicatesMerger
- https://github.com/frangoud/ZoteroDuplicatesMerger
- easier merging of duplicates
- zotero-folder-import
- https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-folder-import
- bulk import PDFs from a folder
- zotero-tag
- https://github.com/windingwind/zotero-tag
- allows to add stars to items (Num Key `1`, `2`, `3` etc.)
- PDF Tools:
- qpdf
- removing passwords, unlocking PDFs, conversion
- install in WSL with `apt-get install qpdf`
- remove password with `qpdf --decrypt --password="" input.pdf output.pdf`
- `SumatraPDF`
- _Really_ fast Viewing of PDFs and adding annotations (highlight, comment etc.)
- Highlight Text: `A`, Save to file: `CTRL+SHIFT+S`
- it is much faster than Adobe Acrobat
- [pdfplumber](https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber)
- Awesome python package to extract tables from PDFs into data pipelines. Use with Jupyter Lab.
- [PDF X-Change viewer](https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor), `choco install pdfxchangeviewer`
- for manual OCR of pages/PDFs
I recently tried pdfplumber [1] to extract tables from (relatively) difficult formatted tables in PDF, and it was a great experience. I can recommend it. Before I ended up using pdfplumber, I tried at least three other PDF packages and they did not work as easily or as expected.
[1]: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
In Show HN: I am building a new Python library to read/write PDF filesTry extracting tabular data from a PDF! With XML it's trivial, but for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this. One of the best, pdfplumber, is largely based [1] on a Master's thesis titled Algorithmic Extraction of Data in Tables in PDF Documents [2].
[1] https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber/blob/stable/pdfplumber/...
[2] https://trepo.tuni.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/21520/Nurmi...
In USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023>My (flippant) reaction to a friend that brought the comment to my attention was unhelpful; "Step 1 day 1, quit." So he has challenged me to write eight helpful blog posts during the remainder of my Garden Leave.
One way to do it would be to do impedance matching: maximizing usefulness by bringing Python to the universe the person who asked the question lives in: Excel, Word, PDF, email.
This means "Automate the Boring Stuff"[0] to ease into programming with something specific to do that is relevant and useful right off the bat for manipulating files, spreadsheets, PDF documents, etc.
Openpyxl[1] for playing more with Excel files, and basically searching "Excel Python" on the internet for more use cases.
Python-docx[2] for playing with Word documents, extracting content from tables, etc.
PdfPlumber[3] for playing with PDFs. Sometimes you
Read the rest
have data in .pptx files, and you can use LibreOffice to convert all of them to PDFs because you hate the pptx format:
libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf *.pptx
Also, if you both are using notebooks, take a look at what we're building at https://iko.ai. I posted about it a bit earlier[4]. It has no-setup real-time Jupyter notebooks, and all the jazz. Focuses on solving machine learning problems since we built it for ourselves to slash projects' time.
- [0]: https://nostarch.com/automatestuff2
- [1]: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
- [2]: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
- [3]: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
- [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608098
Check the following threads:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24460142
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24471058
There also is a Python library:
- https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
In Ask HN: Software for Reading Pdfs?A shout-out for PDF Plumber: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
I've done lots of work in this space, including computer vision and ML approaches, and Tabula[1] which was the gold standard for extraction.
PDF Plumber is better on just about every example I've tried.
[1] https://tabula.technology/
In What's so hard about PDF text extraction?An alternative: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber
In A Python Library to extract tabular data from PDFsVery cool, thanks for sharing. I'm guessing it doesn't do OCR yet? FWIW, you may be interested in these similar projects, which are popular in the journalism community though they don't provide the same high-level interface or data-inference, just the PDF-to-delimited text processing:
- http://tabula.technology/ (Java)
- https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber (pure Python as well)
In Using Google Cloud Vision OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents