Over the past year I’ve been working on ExtractPDF4J, an open-source Java library for extracting tables from real-world PDFs.
Many document processing pipelines rely on PDFs like bank statements, financial reports, or invoices. In practice these files are inconsistent: some are text-based, others are scanned images, and many contain irregular layouts or multi-page tables.
Most existing tools in this space are Python-based (like Camelot or Tabula). In JVM-heavy environments this often means running a separate Python service or building a hybrid stack.
ExtractPDF4J was designed to solve this problem directly in Java.
Key ideas behind the project:
• Hybrid parsing strategies (stream + lattice detection)
• OCR fallback for scanned documents
• CLI and service modules for production workflows
• Maven Central distribution for easy integration
The latest release also introduced a BOM module to simplify dependency management and a full documentation site.
I’d really appreciate feedback from people who have dealt with messy PDF extraction problems. Suggestions and contributions are welcome. Star the repo for more reach to the Java community.
Thank you!
Hi HN,
Over the past year I’ve been working on ExtractPDF4J, an open-source Java library for extracting tables from real-world PDFs.
Many document processing pipelines rely on PDFs like bank statements, financial reports, or invoices. In practice these files are inconsistent: some are text-based, others are scanned images, and many contain irregular layouts or multi-page tables.
Most existing tools in this space are Python-based (like Camelot or Tabula). In JVM-heavy environments this often means running a separate Python service or building a hybrid stack.
ExtractPDF4J was designed to solve this problem directly in Java.
Key ideas behind the project:
• Hybrid parsing strategies (stream + lattice detection) • OCR fallback for scanned documents • CLI and service modules for production workflows • Maven Central distribution for easy integration
The latest release also introduced a BOM module to simplify dependency management and a full documentation site.
Project: https://github.com/ExtractPDF4J/ExtractPDF4J
Docs: https://extractpdf4j.github.io/ExtractPDF4J/
I’d really appreciate feedback from people who have dealt with messy PDF extraction problems. Suggestions and contributions are welcome. Star the repo for more reach to the Java community. Thank you!