pdfplumber-clj

Plain-data PDF extraction for Clojure. Pull text, words, characters, geometric objects, and tables out of digitally generated PDFs as EDN/JSON-friendly maps and vectors — the Clojure counterpart to Python's pdfplumber, built on Apache PDFBox.

Stack

Status

Early release (0.2.0). The extraction API (text, words, chars, objects, tables, crop) is in place and validated against the Python pdfplumber corpus; it may still evolve before 1.0.

Install

deps.edn

net.clojars.savya/pdfplumber-clj {:mvn/version "0.2.0"}

Leiningen

[net.clojars.savya/pdfplumber-clj "0.2.0"]

Requires JDK 17+.

Quickstart

(require '[pdfplumber.core :as pdf])

(pdf/with-pdf [doc "statement.pdf"]
  (pdf/text doc {:page 1}))           ; => "Account statement\n..."

(pdf/with-pdf [doc "statement.pdf"]
  (pdf/words doc {:page 1}))          ; => [{:text "Account" :x0 .. :top .. :x1 .. :bottom ..} ...]

(pdf/with-pdf [doc "invoice.pdf"]
  (pdf/extract-table doc {:page 1 :strategy :lines}))

Tables

extract-tables returns every independent table region on a page, ordered top-to-bottom then left-to-right. extract-table returns only the first region. Configure each axis independently with :vertical-strategy and :horizontal-strategy; each accepts :lines, :lines-strict, :text, or :explicit. The legacy :strategy option sets both axes.

(pdf/extract-tables doc
  {:page 1
   :vertical-strategy :explicit
   :horizontal-strategy :lines
   :explicit-vertical-lines [70 170 260]
   :snap-tolerance 3.0
   :join-tolerance 3.0
   :edge-min-length 3.0
   :intersection-tolerance 3.0
   :min-words-vertical 3
   :min-words-horizontal 1})

Use :explicit-horizontal-lines with :horizontal-strategy :explicit. Explicit lines may be coordinates or maps with bounded line coordinates.

Images

images returns drawn image objects. Images also appear as :image entries in objects. Each image includes its bbox, pixel :width and :height, :colorspace, :bits, :mask?, and :smask?. Decoded PNG bytes are omitted by default.

(pdf/images doc {:page 1})
(pdf/images doc {:page 1 :include-image-data? true}) ; adds :bytes

Coordinate system

Public coordinates use a top-left origin (matching pdfplumber), with bounding boxes as [x0 top x1 bottom] in PDF user-space points. PDFBox's native bottom-left coordinates are converted internally.

Scope

In: text/word/char and image extraction, page geometry, crop/filter, multi-table extraction from ruling lines, text alignment, or explicit lines, and deterministic plain-data output.

Out (v1): PDF generation, OCR, scanned/image PDFs, AcroForm extraction, layout ML. Table :text strategy is heuristic and intended for digitally generated PDFs.

License

Copyright © 2026 Savyasachi.

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License 2.0.