Archival documents are difficult to recognize because they are often damaged. Moreover, variations between documents are important even for documents having a priori the same structure. A recognition system to overcome these difficulties requires external knowledge. Therefore we present a recognition system using a user description. To use table descriptions in analyzing the image, our system uses the intersections of two rulings with a close extremity of one or each of these two rulings. We present some results to show how our system can recognize tables with a general description and how it can deal with noise with a more precise description.