Extract figures and tables from PDFs

Extracting figures and tables from PDFs can be done using various tools and methods depending on your needs (manual vs automated, quality, programming skills). Here’s a detailed guide on approaches and tools you can use:

1. Manual Extraction

• Adobe Acrobat Pro
  Allows you to select and export images and tables as separate files or copy-paste them.

  • Use the Selection tool to highlight the figure or table

  • Right-click and Save Image As… or copy the table to Excel/Word

  • Export PDF to Excel or Word to get tables in editable formats

• Screenshot / Snipping Tools
  For figures, sometimes the easiest way is to take a high-res screenshot and crop.

2. Automated Extraction Using Software Tools

• Tabula (tabula.technology)
  Open-source tool focused on extracting tables from PDFs.

  • Upload PDF

  • Select table area

  • Export as CSV, Excel

• Camelot (Python library)
  Automated table extraction from PDFs. Works best with machine-generated PDFs (not scanned).

  python
  CopyEdit
  import camelot
  tables = camelot.read_pdf('file.pdf')
  tables.export('tables.csv', f='csv')
  

• pdfplumber (Python library)
  Extract text, tables, and metadata, with more granular control.

  python
  CopyEdit
  import pdfplumber
  with pdfplumber.open("file.pdf") as pdf:
      first_page = pdf.pages[0]
      table = first_page.extract_table()
      print(table)
  

• PyMuPDF / fitz
  Extract images and figures from PDFs programmatically.

  python
  CopyEdit
  import fitz
  doc = fitz.open("file.pdf")
  for page_number in range(len(doc)):
      page = doc[page_number]
      images = page.get_images()
      for img in images:
          xref = img[0]
          pix = fitz.Pixmap(doc, xref)
          pix.save(f"image_{page_number}_{xref}.png")
  

3. Using Online Tools (for occasional use)

• Smallpdf
  Extract images or convert PDF tables to Excel online.

• PDFTables
  Online service that converts PDF tables to Excel/CSV.

• ExtractTable.com
  Online tool to extract tables and export them.

4. OCR for Scanned PDFs

If the PDF is scanned (images of text/tables), you need OCR:

• Tesseract OCR + Python libraries like pdfplumber or OpenCV
  Extract images, run OCR on them to get table text.

• ABBYY FineReader
  Commercial OCR tool with good table extraction.

Summary by Task:

If you want, I can help generate Python code tailored to your PDFs for batch extraction of tables or images. Would you prefer a coding-based or tool-based solution?