tabula

Tabula is a Latin word meaning tablet, board, or plate. In modern usage it appears in a variety of disciplines as a general term for a sheet or data table, and it is the source of several specialized phrases, including tabula rasa and tabula recta.

In classical antiquity, tabula referred to writing tablets—flat surfaces, often made of wood coated with wax—used for notes, letters, or accounts. Wax tablets were reusable and common in education, commerce, and everyday life, serving as portable, erasable screens for advancing writing and calculation.

Several notable artifacts and terms have preserved the use of tabula in scholarly contexts. The Tabula Peutingeriana, commonly called the Peutinger Table, is a medieval copy of a Roman road map showing routes and stations across the empire. The Tabula Iliaca refers to a collection of inscribed marble tablets from the early Imperial period that depict scenes from the Iliad and are annotated in Greek and Latin, illustrating literary and mythographic traditions.

In contemporary settings, Tabula is the name of a free, open-source software project designed to extract tabular data from PDF documents. Tabula provides a graphical interface for selecting tables and exporting the data to CSV, Excel, or JSON formats.

Linguistically and culturally, tabula appears in phrases such as tabula rasa, the notion of a blank slate at birth, and tabula recta, a 26-letter cipher square used in classical cryptography, underpinning many monoalphabetic and polyalphabetic ciphers.