Pdfplumber

If you’re extracting data from PDFs in Python, you’ll encounter three libraries repeatedly: pdfplumber, PyMuPDF (imported as fitz), and PyPDF2. They overlap in capability but differ in what they’re optimised for. Picking the wrong one costs time. Here’s how to pick the right one.

Extracting tables from PDFs is one of the most common requirements in document automation and one of the most reliable ways to introduce subtle errors if you do it carelessly. This guide covers table extraction with pdfplumber — the most capable Python library for this — including how it works, when it works, and what to do when it doesn’t.