# Table of Contents

1.  [Overview](#org7458939)
2.  [Requirements](#org68f202b)
    1.  [External](#org711e7dc)
3.  [Demo](#orge0b4c25)
4.  [Modules](#org89ead1e)



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# Overview

This python package contains modules to help with finding and extracting tabular
data from a PDF or image into a CSV format.

Given an image that contains a table&#x2026;

![img](resources/examples/example-page.png)

Extract the the text into a CSV format&#x2026;

    PRIZE,ODDS 1 IN:,# OF WINNERS*
    $3,9.09,"282,447"
    $5,16.66,"154,097"
    $7,40.01,"64,169"
    $10,26.67,"96,283"
    $20,100.00,"25,677"
    $30,290.83,"8,829"
    $50,239.66,"10,714"
    $100,919.66,"2,792"
    $500,"6,652.07",386
    "$40,000","855,899.99",3
    1,i223,
    Toa,,
    ,,
    ,,"* Based upon 2,567,700"


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# Requirements

Along with the python requirements that are listed in setup.py and that are automatically installed when installing this package through pip, there are a few external requirements for some of the modules.

I haven&rsquo;t looked into the minimum required versions of these dependencies, but I&rsquo;ll list the versions that I&rsquo;m using.


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## External

-   `pdfimages` 20.09.0 of [Poppler](https://poppler.freedesktop.org/)
-   `tesseract` 5.0.0 of [Tesseract](https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract)
-   `mogrify` 7.0.10 of [ImageMagick](https://imagemagick.org/index.php)


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# Demo

There is a demo module that will download an image given a URL and try to extract tables from the image and process the cells into a CSV. You can try it out with one of the images included in this repo.

`pip3 install table_ocr`
`python3 -m table_ocr.demo https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eihli/image-table-ocr/master/resources/test_data/simple.png`

The following should be printed to your terminal after running the above commands.

    Running `extract_tables.main([/tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple.png]).`
    Extracted the following tables from the image:
    [('/tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple.png', ['/tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/table-000.png'])]
    Processing tables for /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple.png.
    Processing table /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/table-000.png.
    Extracted 18 cells from /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/table-000.png
    Cells:
    /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/cells/000-000.png: Cell
    /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/cells/000-001.png: Format
    /tmp/demo_p9on6m8o/simple/cells/000-002.png: Formula
    ...
    
    Here is the entire CSV output:
    
    Cell,Format,Formula
    B4,Percentage,None
    C4,General,None
    D4,Accounting,None
    E4,Currency,"=PMT(B4/12,C4,D4)"
    F4,Currency,=E4*C4


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# Modules

The package is split into modules with narrow focuses.

-   `pdf_to_images` uses Poppler and ImageMagick to extract images from a PDF.
-   `extract_tables` finds and extracts table-looking things from an image.
-   `extract_cells` extracts and orders cells from a table.
-   `ocr_image` uses Tesseract to OCR the text from an image of a cell.
-   `ocr_to_csv` converts into a CSV the directory structure that `ocr_image` outputs.

The outputs of a previous module can be used by a subsequent module so that they
can be chained together to create the entire workflow, as demonstrated by the
following shell script.

    #!/bin/sh
    
    PDF=$1
    
    python -m table_ocr.pdf_to_images $PDF | grep .png > /tmp/pdf-images.txt
    cat /tmp/pdf-images.txt | xargs -I{} python -m table_ocr.extract_tables {}  | grep table > /tmp/extracted-tables.txt
    cat /tmp/extracted-tables.txt | xargs -I{} python -m table_ocr.extract_cells {} | grep cells > /tmp/extracted-cells.txt
    cat /tmp/extracted-cells.txt | xargs -I{} python -m table_ocr.ocr_image {}
    
    for image in $(cat /tmp/extracted-tables.txt); do
        dir=$(dirname $image)
        python -m table_ocr.ocr_to_csv $(find $dir/cells -name "*.txt")
    done

The package was written in a [literate programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming) style. The source code at
<https://eihli.github.io/image-table-ocr/pdf_table_extraction_and_ocr.html> is
meant to act as the documentation and reference material.