Table Recognition

Overview

Table Recognition reconstructs the internal structure of tables detected during layout analysis, including rows, columns, merged cells, and cell boundaries, so that the converted document preserves the original tabular semantics instead of producing a flat grid of text fragments.

It is controlled by the independent option enable_ai_table_recognition, which is enabled by default. The table model is only invoked for table regions reported by layout analysis whose detection confidence is below the trusted threshold; high-confidence native PDF tables bypass the model to save inference time.

Typical scenarios that benefit from Table Recognition:

• Borderless or partially bordered tables, where ruling lines alone cannot describe the structure.
• Tables with merged header cells, multi-row headers, or spanning cells, such as financial statements, lab reports, and invoices.
• Scanned tables processed by OCR, where geometric reconstruction is required before cell-level data extraction.

Features that support Table Recognition:

• PDF to Word
• PDF to Excel
• PDF to PowerPoint (Slides)
• PDF to HTML
• PDF to RTF
• PDF to CSV
• Extract PDF to JSON
• Extract PDF to Markdown

Notice

• Table Recognition runs only when layout analysis is active (i.e. enable_ai_layout = true, or implicitly when enable_ocr = true).
• You need to load the DocumentAI model before using Table Recognition, or plug in your own table model via the callbacks described in 3.11 Use Custom AI Models via Callbacks.
• Setting enable_ai_table_recognition = false disables the table model entirely; detected table regions will then fall back to geometric reconstruction from the underlying page objects.
• The number of Table Recognition model instances can be tuned via the second parameter of LibraryManager::SetDocumentAIModelCount. See 3.2 Set DocumentAI Model.

Sample

This sample demonstrates how to convert a PDF to a DOCX file with Table Recognition enabled.

// Set the DocumentAI model path.
LibraryManager::SetDocumentAIModel("path/documentai.model");

ConvertOptions opt;
// Layout analysis must be enabled for Table Recognition to take effect.
opt.enable_ai_layout = true;
// Enable AI table recognition (enabled by default; set to false to disable).
opt.enable_ai_table_recognition = true;
CPDFConversion::StartPDFToWord("word.pdf", "password", "path/output.docx", opt);