Hi Christina,
Good morning from grey Connecticut!
It is a paid service, but ABBYY FineReader is the software I’ve seen used most often to OCR tabular data.
All best,
Gavi
Gavi Levy Haskell (they/them or she/her)
Associate Director, Computational Methods and Data
Yale Library
________________________________
From: Code for Libraries <CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG> on behalf of Pikas, Christina K. <Christina.Pikas_at_JHUAPL.EDU>
Sent: Friday, April 3, 2026 7:28:22 AM
To: CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG <CODE4LIB_at_LISTS.CLIR.ORG>
Subject: [CODE4LIB] What's the current best for extracting tables from ocr'd text?
Hi All,
Good morning from foggy Maryland. Materials scientists and aerospace engineers have these 1970s and 1980s (and prob before) technical reports with vast tables of experimental data. Pasting a picture below to give a flavor:
[cid:image002.png_at_01DCC33B.72E4B430]
I can OCR this with Acrobat Pro, but what's the current best for extracting the table? We can't upload this into a commercial service and our on prem AI models went "NOPE!" I tried tabula - and did ok with some of the tables sprinkled through the text but not ones like shown in the image. It looks like there are a number of tools intended for AI and RAG (like Docling). Does anyone have experience with these for this purpose?
If it's a paid service also interested, depending on a number of factors.
Thanks in advance,
Christina
Christina K. Pikas, PhD
Principal Professional Staff
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Rd, Laurel, MD 20723
O: (240) 228-4812
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Received on Fri Apr 03 2026 - 07:57:07 EDT