如何阻止 camelot-py 将单个单元格中的多行文本拆分为多个单元格？

Question

I am trying to build an app which reads arbitrary PDFs and extracts tables from them and I am using Camelot for extracting the tables. This is working fine for tables in which cells have single line values. However, for tables having cells with multi-line values, Camelot is splitting the multi-line text in a single cell, into multiple cells. Since Camelot is built on top of pdfminer, I tried to tweak the layout analysis parameters (specifically line_margin ) to make Camelot not split the lines. However, the issue remains.

What other parameters can I tweak to handle this issue? Here is an example of the tables which have this issue.

I do not want to use the 'lattice' flavor as most of the tables that I expect to see do not have demarcating lines.

Answer 1

If your PDFs tables have lines that are brighter than the cells, as in your example, then you might try lattice flavour with process_background=True.

tables = camelot.read_pdf('background_lines.pdf', process_background=True)

See, https://camelot-py.readthedocs.io/en/master/user/advanced.html