pdfplumber fails to extract tables from specific PDFs

[jongchan988]

Describe the bug

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Have you tried repairing the PDF?

Please try running your code with pdfplumber.open(..., repair=True) before submitting a bug report.

Code to reproduce the problem

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        with pdfplumber.open(documentPath) as pdf:
            for page in pdf.pages:
                tables = page.find_tables()
                print("tables.cnt: " + str(len(tables)))

PDF file

Please attach any PDFs necessary to reproduce the problem.

ocpp-1.6 edition 2.pdf

Expected behavior

What did you expect the result should have been?
detect this table

Actual behavior

What actually happened, instead?
It doesn't detect

Screenshots

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Environment

• pdfplumber version: 0.11.5
• Python version: 3.12
• OS: Window11

Additional context

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[jsvine]

Hi @jongchan988, and thanks for your interest in this library. PDFs have no internal concept of a "table," and much of what we perceive to be a "table" is based on human perception. This is particularly true for tables that don't have graphical objects/borders separating their cells, like in this example.

There are various approaches to extracting tables like these, if you expect a similar structure every time. For example, you could use the positional information of the words in the FIELD NAME FIELD TYPE CARD. DESCRIPTION as input for the "explicit_vertical_lines": [...] table extraction settings.