If you’ve ever tried to do anything with data provided to you in PDFs, you know how painful this is — you can’t easily copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files. Tabula allows you to extract that data in CSV format, through a simple web interface.

Caveat: Tabula only works on text-based PDFs, not scanned (purely image based) documents. If you can click-and-drag to select text in your table in a PDF viewer (even if the output is disorganized trash), then your PDF is text-based and Tabula should work.

Security Concerns?: Tabula is designed with security in mind. Your PDF and the extracted data never touch the net -- when you use Tabula on your local machine, as long as your browser's URL bar says "localhost" or "127.0.0.1", all processing takes place on your local machine. Even external version checks and the anonymous stats counter have been disabled in the snap.

If you start the program by clicking on it's icon this snap starts a local web server and then automatically opens a browser window. Close the terminal window to stop the server.

To learn how to use Tabula in the best way, I recommend Alastair Otter's tutorials on YouTube: https://youtu.be/IEusn9HB1sc

In addition to the Tabula server this snap brings you "Tabula-Java" - the command line version of Tabula. Type tabula --help in your terminal to learn about the available parameters.

It is a community snap without support by Tabula's authors.