PDF Processing Guide Overview This guide covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command-line tools. For advanced features, JavaScript libraries, and detailed examples, see REFERENCE.md. If you need to fill out a PDF form, read FORMS.md and follow its instructions. 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 } " ) print ( f"Creator: { meta . creator } " ) 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 with pdfplumber . open ( "document.pdf" ) as pdf : for i , page in enumerate ( pdf . pages ) : tables = page . extract_tables ( ) for j , table in enumerate ( tables ) : print ( f"Table { j + 1 } on page { i + 1 } :" ) for row in table : print ( row ) Advanced Table Extraction 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 :

Check if table is not empty

df

pd . DataFrame ( table [ 1 : ] , columns = table [ 0 ] ) all_tables . append ( df )

Combine all tables

if all_tables : combined_df = pd . concat ( all_tables , ignore_index = True ) combined_df . to_excel ( "extracted_tables.xlsx" , index = False ) reportlab - Create PDFs Basic PDF Creation 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 )

Save

c . save ( ) Create PDF with Multiple Pages from reportlab . lib . pagesizes import letter from reportlab . platypus import SimpleDocTemplate , Paragraph , Spacer , PageBreak from reportlab . lib . styles import getSampleStyleSheet doc = SimpleDocTemplate ( "report.pdf" , pagesize = letter ) styles = getSampleStyleSheet ( ) story = [ ]

Add content

title

Paragraph ( "Report Title" , styles [ 'Title' ] ) story . append ( title ) story . append ( Spacer ( 1 , 12 ) ) body = Paragraph ( "This is the body of the report. " * 20 , styles [ 'Normal' ] ) story . append ( body ) story . append ( PageBreak ( ) )

Page 2

story . append ( Paragraph ( "Page 2" , styles [ 'Heading1' ] ) ) story . append ( Paragraph ( "Content for page 2" , styles [ 'Normal' ] ) )

Build PDF

doc

.

build

(

story

)

Subscripts and Superscripts

IMPORTANT

Never use Unicode subscript/superscript characters (₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉, ⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹) in ReportLab PDFs. The built-in fonts do not include these glyphs, causing them to render as solid black boxes. Instead, use ReportLab's XML markup tags in Paragraph objects: from reportlab . platypus import Paragraph from reportlab . lib . styles import getSampleStyleSheet styles = getSampleStyleSheet ( )

Subscripts: use _tag

chemical

Paragraph ( "H₂O" , styles [ 'Normal' ] )

Superscripts: use tag

squared

Paragraph ( "x2 + y2" , styles [ 'Normal' ] ) For canvas-drawn text (not Paragraph objects), manually adjust font the size and position rather than using Unicode subscripts/superscripts. 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 qpdf input.pdf --pages . 6 -10 -- pages6-10.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 pdftk (if available)

Merge

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

Split

pdftk input.pdf burst

Rotate

pdftk input.pdf rotate 1east output rotated.pdf Common Tasks Extract Text from Scanned PDFs

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

This extracts all images as 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 Fill PDF forms pdf-lib or pypdf (see FORMS.md) See FORMS.md Next Steps For advanced pypdfium2 usage, see REFERENCE.md For JavaScript libraries (pdf-lib), see REFERENCE.md If you need to fill out a PDF form, follow the instructions in FORMS.md For troubleshooting guides, see REFERENCE.md