Tabula is a PDF table extraction tool and data scraper designed to isolate tabular structures within text-based PDF files. It functions as a converter that transforms these layouts into structured CSV or spreadsheet formats for data recovery and analysis.
The project provides both a visual interface for manually selecting table areas and a headless command-line interface. This dual approach allows for a choice between manual data recovery via visual-area selection and the integration of table extraction into automated data pipelines.
The extraction process utilizes Java-based PDF parsing and pattern-based row detection to identify table boundaries. Once identified, the tool performs coordinate-based text extraction to serialize the data into comma-separated values.