PDF Extractor CLI Development

📄 PDF Extractor CLI: Modular PDF Parsing Tool with OCR & Table Support

In document-heavy industries such as finance, legal, and government, extracting structured data from PDFs is a recurring challenge. Static documents, scanned files, mixed layouts — these factors make automation non-trivial.

To address this, I built PDF Extractor CLI, a modular, open-source command-line tool written in Python that enables reliable and flexible data extraction from PDF files.

The goal was to create a unified CLI tool that can:

Extract plain text from standard PDFs

Parse tables into structured formats (CSV/JSON)

Run OCR on scanned documents

Handle large-scale and batch extractions

All of this had to be scriptable, customizable, and easy to integrate into data pipelines.

✅ Text Extraction: Extract readable text from digital PDFs

✅ Table Parsing: Automatically detect and export tables

✅ OCR Layer: Recognize and digitize scanned image PDFs

✅ Flexible Output: Save results as .txt, .csv, or .json

✅ Modular CLI: Enable/disable components via arguments

python pdf_extractor_cli.py --input invoice.pdf --ocr --tables --output ./results/

Invoice processing for accounting systems

Data mining from academic or government reports

Digitizing scanned historical documents

Table extraction for quantitative analysis from research papers

GUI version with Streamlit for non-developers

Multilingual OCR support (Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, etc.)

Integration with Google Drive / Dropbox APIs

Batch processing mode with progress bar and logs

GitHub: github.com/sfkbstnc/pdf-extractor-cli