Apache PDFBox VS tabula

Are you looking for a way to render PDF's or produce them? If you want to produce PDF's, I've used https://pdfbox.apache.org/ successfully as well as https://itextpdf.com/ (potentially costs money).

If you don't mind using java, you can use the open source Apache PDFBox library

https://pdfbox.apache.org/

It's relatively performant and it's a mature and supported codebase that can accomplish most pdf tasks.

Then, open the pdf_utils/pom.xml file and add a dependency to PDFBox, in the dependencies section:

There are some libraries for Java that can help you create a PDF file such as PDFBox or IText. Here there's a short exaplanation on how to use them.

So, when I started to view the documents, a lot of them simply failed to open. I had to look around for a library that could verify PDF documents. I had some experience with PDFBox in the past, so it seemed to be a good go-to solution. It had no way to verify documents by default, but it could open and parse them and that was enough to filter out the incorrect ones. It felt a little bit strange just to read the whole PDF into the memory to verify if it is correct or not, but hey I needed a simple fix for now and it worked really well.

PDFBox can do this. It’s not part of the CLI but it wouldn’t be too hard to add:

https://github.com/apache/pdfbox/blob/5b00807463279f1002e245...

Another option would be JRuby. I routinely use an application called Tabula, which is built using JRuby and compiles to a Jar file. This, of course, requires Java on the target machine, but you can ship the Jar file and it will work. It's often easier to rely on a working Java environment than it is a working Ruby environment. Especially on Windows.

Idk if it has been suggested yet, tabulapdf is a self hosted solution to extract tables from PDF

For table extraction from pdfs, have a look at Tabula and Camelot, two open-source projects. They work well with clean tables, both the Tabula Python binding and Camelot allow you to export directly as a pandas dataframe. Otherwise AWS Textract API is very efficient at extracting tables from pdfs, regardless of how clean/messy they are.

No idea if it will work for you, but there is a git project that seems to do what you want https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula

While trying to find a specific project I recalled, I encountered this list of projects which might be of interest: https://github.com/tstanislawek/awesome-document-understandi...

The project I had in mind was similar to this one but I can't remember the name currently: https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula

However, if you're looking for a ML-based, invoice-specific project looks like the other comment to your reply might be more useful.