processing-pdfs

name	processing-pdfs
description	Reads, creates, merges, splits, and edits PDF files, including text and table extraction, form filling, OCR on scanned documents, and watermarking. Activates when the user works with .pdf files or requests any PDF manipulation task.

PDF Processing Guide

This guide covers essential PDF operations using Python libraries and command-line tools. For advanced features and JavaScript libraries, see reference.md. For PDF form completion, see forms.md.

Quick Reference

Task	Tool	Command/Method
Read text	pdfplumber	page.extract_text()
Extract tables	pdfplumber	page.extract_tables()
Merge PDFs	pypdf	PdfMerger().append()
Split pages	pypdf	PdfWriter().add_page()
Create PDF	reportlab	canvas.Canvas()
Text extraction (CLI)	pdftotext	pdftotext -layout file.pdf
Merge/split (CLI)	qpdf	qpdf --pages
OCR scanned docs	pytesseract	image_to_string()

Reading PDFs

Extract Text with pdfplumber

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        text = page.extract_text()
        print(text)

Extract Tables to Excel

import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("report.pdf") as pdf:
    tables = []
    for page in pdf.pages:
        page_tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in page_tables:
            df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
            tables.append(df)

    # Export to Excel
    with pd.ExcelWriter("output.xlsx") as writer:
        for i, df in enumerate(tables):
            df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name=f"Table_{i+1}", index=False)

Get PDF Metadata

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
info = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {info.title}")
print(f"Author: {info.author}")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

Creating PDFs

Simple PDF with reportlab

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.setFont("Helvetica", 12)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello, World!")
c.save()

Multi-page Document with Platypus

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet

doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf", pagesize=letter)
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
story = []

story.append(Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Heading1']))
story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
story.append(Paragraph("This is the body text.", styles['Normal']))

doc.build(story)

Merging and Splitting

Merge Multiple PDFs

from pypdf import PdfMerger

merger = PdfMerger()
merger.append("file1.pdf")
merger.append("file2.pdf")
merger.append("file3.pdf")
merger.write("merged.pdf")
merger.close()

Split PDF into Pages

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages):
    writer = PdfWriter()
    writer.add_page(page)
    writer.write(f"page_{i+1}.pdf")

Extract Page Range

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

# Extract pages 5-10 (0-indexed)
for page_num in range(4, 10):
    writer.add_page(reader.pages[page_num])

writer.write("extracted.pdf")

Command-Line Tools

pdftotext (from poppler-utils)

# Extract text with layout preservation
pdftotext -layout document.pdf output.txt

# Extract specific pages
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 document.pdf output.txt

# Output to stdout
pdftotext document.pdf -

qpdf

# Merge PDFs
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf

# Extract pages 1-5
qpdf document.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- extracted.pdf

# Rotate pages
qpdf document.pdf --rotate=90:1-5 rotated.pdf

# Remove password
qpdf --password=secret --decrypt protected.pdf unlocked.pdf

pdftk (alternative)

# Merge
pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf

# Split
pdftk document.pdf burst output page_%d.pdf

# Rotate
pdftk document.pdf cat 1-5east output rotated.pdf

Advanced Operations

OCR Scanned Documents

from pdf2image import convert_from_path
import pytesseract

# Convert PDF pages to images
images = convert_from_path("scanned.pdf", dpi=300)

# OCR each page
text = ""
for image in images:
    text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image)

print(text)

Add Watermark

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf")

writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
    page.merge_page(watermark.pages[0])
    writer.add_page(page)

writer.write("watermarked.pdf")

Extract Images

# Using pdfimages (from poppler-utils)
pdfimages -png document.pdf images/

Password Protection

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

for page in reader.pages:
    writer.add_page(page)

writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")
writer.write("protected.pdf")

Dependencies

Install required packages:

# Python libraries
pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab pdf2image pytesseract pandas openpyxl

# System tools (macOS)
brew install poppler tesseract qpdf

# System tools (Ubuntu/Debian)
apt-get install poppler-utils tesseract-ocr qpdf