PDF Processing Guide

Overview

This guide covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command-line tools.

Quick Start

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

Read a PDF

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

Extract text

text = "" for page in reader.pages: text += page.extract_text()

Python Libraries

pypdf - Basic Operations

Merge PDFs

from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

writer = PdfWriter() for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]: reader = PdfReader(pdf_file) for page in reader.pages: writer.add_page(page)

with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Split PDF

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages): writer = PdfWriter() writer.add_page(page) with open(f"page_{i+1}.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Extract Metadata

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") meta = reader.metadata print(f"Title: {meta.title}") print(f"Author: {meta.author}") print(f"Subject: {meta.subject}")

Rotate Pages

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") writer = PdfWriter() page = reader.pages[0] page.rotate(90) # Rotate 90 degrees clockwise writer.add_page(page) with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction

Extract Text with Layout

import pdfplumber

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

Extract Tables

import pandas as pd

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

if all_tables:
    combined_df = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True)
    combined_df.to_excel("extracted_tables.xlsx", index=False)

reportlab - Create PDFs

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

c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf", pagesize=letter) width, height = letter

Add text

c.drawString(100, height - 100, "Hello World!") c.drawString(100, height - 120, "This is a PDF created with reportlab")

Add a line

c.line(100, height - 140, 400, height - 140)

c.save()

Command-Line Tools

pdftotext (poppler-utils)

Extract text

pdftotext input.pdf output.txt

Extract text preserving layout

pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt

Extract specific pages

pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf output.txt # Pages 1-5

qpdf

Merge PDFs

qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf

Split pages

qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- pages1-5.pdf

Rotate pages

qpdf input.pdf output.pdf --rotate=+90:1 # Rotate page 1 by 90 degrees

Remove password

qpdf --password=mypassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf

Common Tasks

Extract Text from Scanned PDFs (OCR)

Requires: pip install pytesseract pdf2image

import pytesseract from pdf2image import convert_from_path

Convert PDF to images

images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')

OCR each page

text = "" for i, image in enumerate(images): text += f"Page {i + 1}:\n" text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image) text += "\n\n"

print(text)

Add Watermark

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

Create watermark (or load existing)

watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf").pages[0]

Apply to all pages

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") writer = PdfWriter() for page in reader.pages: page.merge_page(watermark) writer.add_page(page)

with open("watermarked.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Extract Images

Using pdfimages (poppler-utils)

pdfimages -j input.pdf output_prefix

Creates output_prefix-000.jpg, output_prefix-001.jpg, etc.

Password Protection

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") writer = PdfWriter() for page in reader.pages: writer.add_page(page)

Add password

writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword") with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Quick Reference

Task Best Tool Command/Code

Merge PDFs pypdf writer.add_page(page)

Split PDFs pypdf One page per file

Extract text pdfplumber page.extract_text()

Extract tables pdfplumber page.extract_tables()

Create PDFs reportlab Canvas or Platypus

Command line merge qpdf qpdf --empty --pages ...

OCR scanned PDFs pytesseract Convert to image first

Dependencies

Python libraries

pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab pytesseract pdf2image

System tools

macOS

brew install poppler tesseract qpdf

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install poppler-utils tesseract-ocr qpdf

Attribution

Based on anthropics/skills pdf skill.