PDF Processing Quick start Use pdfplumber to extract text from PDFs: import pdfplumber with pdfplumber . open ( "document.pdf" ) as pdf : text = pdf . pages [ 0 ] . extract_text ( ) print ( text ) Extracting tables Extract tables from PDFs with automatic detection: import pdfplumber with pdfplumber . open ( "report.pdf" ) as pdf : page = pdf . pages [ 0 ] tables = page . extract_tables ( ) for table in tables : for row in table : print ( row ) Extracting all pages Process multi-page documents efficiently: import pdfplumber with pdfplumber . open ( "document.pdf" ) as pdf : full_text = "" for page in pdf . pages : full_text += page . extract_text ( ) + "\n\n" print ( full_text ) Form filling For PDF form filling, see FORMS.md for the complete guide including field analysis and validation. Merging PDFs Combine multiple PDF files: from pypdf import PdfMerger merger = PdfMerger ( ) for pdf in [ "file1.pdf" , "file2.pdf" , "file3.pdf" ] : merger . append ( pdf ) merger . write ( "merged.pdf" ) merger . close ( ) Splitting PDFs Extract specific pages or ranges: from pypdf import PdfReader , PdfWriter reader = PdfReader ( "input.pdf" ) writer = PdfWriter ( )

Extract pages 2-5

for page_num in range ( 1 , 5 ) : writer . add_page ( reader . pages [ page_num ] ) with open ( "output.pdf" , "wb" ) as output : writer . write ( output ) Available packages pdfplumber - Text and table extraction (recommended) pypdf - PDF manipulation, merging, splitting pdf2image - Convert PDFs to images (requires poppler) pytesseract - OCR for scanned PDFs (requires tesseract) Common patterns Extract and save text: import pdfplumber with pdfplumber . open ( "input.pdf" ) as pdf : text = "\n\n" . join ( page . extract_text ( ) for page in pdf . pages ) with open ( "output.txt" , "w" ) as f : f . write ( text ) Extract tables to CSV: import pdfplumber import csv with pdfplumber . open ( "tables.pdf" ) as pdf : tables = pdf . pages [ 0 ] . extract_tables ( ) with open ( "output.csv" , "w" , newline = "" ) as f : writer = csv . writer ( f ) for table in tables : writer . writerows ( table ) Error handling Handle common PDF issues: import pdfplumber try : with pdfplumber . open ( "document.pdf" ) as pdf : if len ( pdf . pages ) == 0 : print ( "PDF has no pages" ) else : text = pdf . pages [ 0 ] . extract_text ( ) if text is None or text . strip ( ) == "" : print ( "Page contains no extractable text (might be scanned)" ) else : print ( text ) except Exception as e : print ( f"Error processing PDF: { e } " ) Performance tips Process pages in batches for large PDFs Use multiprocessing for multiple files Extract only needed pages rather than entire document Close PDF objects after use