find_tables failing on PDF academic paper

[jamesbraza]

I am working with a PDF export of the paper "PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search" from https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10120 (version 2).

import pymupdf

with pymupdf.open("pasa.pdf") as file:
    # Page 3 should have no tables
    page = file.load_page(2)
    print(page.get_text("text", sort=True))
    print([t.to_markdown() for t in page.find_tables()])

    # Page 8 should have two tables: table 5 and table 6
    page = file.load_page(7)
    print(page.get_text("text", sort=True))
    print([t.to_markdown() for t in page.find_tables()])

When running this Python code, the page 8 tables' contents are in the output of get_text, not find_tables. The find_tables returns no tables. I have tried lots of configuration and have had no luck.

What is going wrong here, can anyone help me figure out what I am missing?

Versions

pymupdf==1.26.3, Python 3.13.5, macOS Sequoia 15.5