image2csv

Data

table extraction

SHOW HN2021

354points
60comments
#92of 2,533 in 2021
Top 4%of 2021 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

5 positive, 17 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 2 critical, out of 24 comments about the project. Thread score +0.15.

Idea: 4 for, 0 againstExecution: 0 for, 2 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Simple and useful

    From 2 comments
  • Useful for extracting tables from scientific documents and datasheets

    From 2 comments
    • This is really neat. A lot of the hard bits in converting scientific pdfs to text is to deal with the tables, which more often than not are graphical and usually do not have a…
      jacquesm on HN
    • I had been meaning to find or write a tool like this for ages -- often times the only place where you can find pinout information for a chip is from a table buried on page 7xx of…
      ohazi on HN

Objections

  • Reliability of OCR tools is doubtful for production use

    From 1 comment
    • My experience in image to text conversion softwares has not given confidence to use in production or as part of reliable workflow. What's unique or different about this tool…
      focus2020 on HN
  • Not robust to varying table formats such as indentation

    From 1 comment
    • Nice! Have used quite a few tools like this to convert data government agencies report in pdfs to csvs. The biggest challenge that existing tools fail to adequately address is…
      bingdig on HN

Requests

  • Support for tables without borders

    From 1 comment
    • Is there also a solution for automatic border detection. Last year tried reading bank statements, which were scanned slips. Unfortunately they didn't have any borders which made…
      technicolorwhat on HN
  • Support for rotated images and multiple tables per image

    From 1 comment
    • How fast is it? Does it work with rotated images? How about multiple tables per image?
      cosmotic on HN
  • Handwriting support

    From 1 comment

Questions

  • Whether it works with letters as well as numbers

    From 1 comment
    • Exactly the application I had in my mind. aperrin, does the tool recognize letters as well, or is it numbers only for now?
      e-_pusher on HN
  • What license applies to the code

    From 2 comments
    • It would be cool if you could put a license for this!
      spudwaffle on HN
    • What is the default license/freedom for work found on GitHub if it doesn't contain a license?
      herpderperator on HN

Alternatives named

  • camelot-py

    From 1 comment
    • Great project! I've had success using camelot-py (https://camelot-py.readthedocs.io) to extract tabular data from PDFs (for images, I use imagemagick to convert those to PDF). If…
      arathore on HN
  • Tabula

    From 1 comment
  • WebPlotDigitizer

    From 1 comment
    • This is similar to WebPlotDigitizer, which helps you extract data from graphs: https://automeris.io/WebPlotDigitizer/index.html
      luplex on HN
  • Azure Form Recognizer

    From 1 comment
  • image-table-ocr

    From 1 comment

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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