pdf-table-pull-lite

Free tool that pulls the tables out of a text PDF and saves each one as a CSV file. Need Excel output, scanned PDFs or tables joined across pages? The paid version does that: pdf-table-pull on Gumroad

Runs on your own computer, so your PDFs are never uploaded anywhere. MIT license. Python 3.10 or newer, on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Install

pip install pdf-table-pull-lite

Or use pipx, which keeps it in its own space:

pipx install pdf-table-pull-lite

Want the newest code from GitHub instead?

pip install git+https://github.com/tidybytetools/pdf-table-pull-lite

Use it

pdf-table-pull-lite statement.pdf                 # CSVs go in statement_tables/
pdf-table-pull-lite statement.pdf -o out/ -p 2-5  # only pages 2 to 5
pdf-table-pull-lite statement.pdf -s text         # tables with no border lines

Example run:

Found 2 table(s).
  page1_table1: 2 rows x 3 columns
  page1_table2: 2 rows x 2 columns
Saved: statement_tables/page1_table1.csv
Saved: statement_tables/page1_table2.csv

You get one CSV per table, named after its page. The CSVs open straight in Excel (they're saved as UTF-8 with a BOM so accents show correctly).

--strategy (-s): lines is for tables with ruled borders, text is for tables lined up by spacing, and auto (the default) tries lines first, then text.

When you run it in a terminal it ends with one short line about the paid version. --quiet turns it off, and it never shows when output is piped or redirected.

Known limits

• Scanned PDFs. Pages that are just an image (no text layer) are skipped, and the tool tells you which ones.
• Tables that continue onto the next page come out as separate CSVs, one per page.
• Odd layouts. Tables with merged cells or no clear columns can come out with cells in the wrong spot. Check the CSV.
• CSV only. No Excel or JSON output, no number cleanup (so (40) stays as text), and no password-protected PDFs.

Lite vs paid

How it compares to other free tools

All of these are free and open source. Pick what fits you.

This tool is built on pdfplumber. If you want full control in your own code, use pdfplumber or Camelot directly.

Use it from Claude Desktop or Cursor (MCP)

There is a small free MCP server built in. It gives your AI app one tool, extract_pdf_tables. It needs uv.

Run it by hand to check it starts (it waits quietly for an app to talk to it):

uvx --from pdf-table-pull-lite pdf-table-pull-lite-mcp

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) or Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pdf-table-pull-lite": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "pdf-table-pull-lite", "pdf-table-pull-lite-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Tool: extract_pdf_tables(path, pages="", strategy="auto", output_dir=""). It returns a list with the CSV text of each table. If you set output_dir, it saves the CSVs there and returns the file paths instead.

For AI agents

• Use when: you have a local PDF with real text (you can select the words) and need its tables as rows.
• Don't use when: the PDF is a scan or photo, it has a password, or you need Excel. Those pages get skipped. Use the paid version for those.
• Input: a file path, plus optional pages like 1,3-5 and strategy (auto, lines, text).
• Output: a list of CSV strings, one per table, first row is the header. Empty list means no tables were found.
• CLI exit code is 0 on success and 1 on error (message on stderr). See also llms.txt.

Tests

pip install pdfplumber "mcp<2"
python3 -m unittest discover tests

License

MIT. See LICENSE.