I am trying to convert pdf to csv file. pdf file has data in tabular format with first row as header. I have reached to the level where I can extract text from a cell, compare the baseline of text in table and detect newline but I need to compare table borders to detect start of table. I do not know how to detect and compare lines in PDF. Can anyone help me?
Thanks!!!
As you've seen (hopefully), PDFs have no concept of tables, just text placed at specific locations and lines drawn around them. There is no internal relationship between the text and the lines. This is very important to understand.
Knowing this, if all of the cells have enough padding you can look for gaps between characters that are large enough such as the width of 3 or more spaces. If the cells don't have enough spacing this will unfortunately probably break.
You could also look at every line in the PDF and try to figure out what represents your "table-like" lines. See this answer for how to walk every token on a page to see what's being drawn.