Introduction

Excalibur is a web interface built on top of Camelot, which is a Python library to extract tabular data from PDFs.

What’s in a name?

Camelot was named after The Camelot Project (also the name of a castle in the Arthurian legend). To follow the same theme, this project was named Excalibur, which is the legendary sword of King Arthur.

Why another tool?

There are both open (Tabula, pdfplumber) and closed-source (Smallpdf, Docparser) tools that are widely used to extract data tables from PDFs. They either give a nice output or fail miserably. There is no in between. This is not helpful since everything in the real world, including PDF table extraction, is fuzzy. This leads to the creation of ad-hoc table extraction scripts for each type of PDF table.

Excalibur uses Camelot under the hood, which was created to offer users complete control over table extraction. If you can’t get your desired output with the default settings, you can tweak them and get the job done!

Here is a comparison of Camelot’s output with outputs from other open-source PDF parsing libraries and tools.

Excalibur LICENSE

MIT License

Copyright (c) Camelot Developers 2018

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.