This page of the wiki aims to compare Camelot's output (qualitatively) with other open-source libraries and tools. Chances are that you've already used one of the libraries/tools mentioned below, have had problems with getting the desired output and are here to see if Camelot can extract tables from your PDFs better.

We believe that Camelot works better than other open-source alternatives out there, we try to avoid bias though, and be fair and accurate here, by listing down advantages other tools might have over Camelot. (While also listing down steps with which Camelot makes up for them using one or more of the configuration parameters.)

We would like your help to keep this document up-to-date. If notice any inconsistency, please let us know by opening an issue.

Table of contents

• Tabula
• pdfplumber
• pdftables
• pdf-table-extract

The naming for parsing methods inside Camelot (i.e. Lattice and Stream) was inspired from Tabula. Lattice is used to parse tables that have demarcated lines between cells, while Stream is used to parse tables that have whitespaces between cells to simulate a table structure.

We took 10 PDFs of each type (lines, for Lattice and whitespaces between tables cells, for Stream) and passed them through Tabula's web interface and Camelot's command-line interface. The CSV outputs were pushed to this repo as is. We found that Camelot works better than Tabula in all Lattice cases. Tabula does better table detection for Stream cases, but it still fails to give good parsing output, which Camelot solves for with its configuration parameters.

Note: We have better table detection for Stream cases in the works. #102

We put a ✔️ in the "Table detected correctly?" column if the table was detected accurately and ❌ if it was not (providing an image of the detected table in both cases). The reasoning behind which output is better is provided in the "Comments" column.

-back

-scale 40

-back

-scale 40

-scale 40

-I 1

-scale 40

-block 99

-const -20

-C 72,95,209,327,442,529,566,606,683

-split

-flag

<s></s>

5 PDFs of each type were used from the table above, for which Camelot required no extra configuration. Tables from the selected PDFs were parsed using this script (which uses pdfplumber) and Camelot's command-line-interface.

The reasoning behind which output is better is provided in the "Comments" column.

The open-source development for pdftables was stopped in September 2013, when it became a closed-source paid tool.

Again, 5 PDFs of each type were used from the table above, for which Camelot required no extra configuration. Tables from the selected PDFs were parsed using this script (which uses pdftables) and Camelot's command-line-interface.

Again, the reasoning behind which output is better is provided in the "Comments" column.

5 PDFs of each type were used from the table above, for which Camelot required no extra configuration. Tables from the selected PDFs were parsed using this script (which uses pdf-table-extract) and Camelot's command-line-interface.

The reasoning behind which output is better is provided in the "Comments" column.