How Can I Extract Structured Tables from a PDF with Font Issues and Non-English Text?

Extracting Structured Tables from PDF Documents

Question:

Despite attempting different methods, you are unable to extract structured table data from PDF documents. Specifically, converting the PDF to HTML yields unsatisfactory results due to font issues and non-English text. Additionally, extracting based on XY coordinates is impractical due to potentially varying table placements in future PDFs.

Expert Analysis:

Unlike structured spreadsheets, PDFs lack explicit table data. Instead, they present a combination of lines and character glyphs that humans perceive as tables. Extracting tabular data requires computational recognition techniques similar to human perception.

In certain circumstances, where PDFs consistently follow a specific format, it may be possible to identify patterns and develop rules for recognizing table content. However, the provided PDF document presents a further challenge:

Embedded Font Issue:

The PDF contains text that is not encoded using the claimed WinAnsiEncoding. This discrepancy results in unpredictable characters being extracted, rendering direct text retrieval impractical.

Text Extraction Limitations:

Copying and pasting from Adobe Reader, a reliable text extraction tool, also fails to produce meaningful results. This indicates that text extraction without optical character recognition (OCR) is not feasible in this case.

Therefore, the extraction of structured tables from your PDF document, without resorting to OCR, is not currently possible.

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