Pdf

PDF Processing

Quick Reference

For form filling workflow, see references/forms.md. For advanced libraries (pypdfium2, pdf-lib), see references/advanced.md.

Reading & Extracting

Text extraction

pythonCopy code
import pdfplumber

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

Table extraction → DataFrame

pythonCopy code
import pdfplumber, pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    tables = []
    for page in pdf.pages:
        for table in page.extract_tables():
            if table:
                df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
                tables.append(df)
    if tables:
        combined = pd.concat(tables, ignore_index=True)
        combined.to_excel("tables.xlsx", index=False)

Metadata

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
meta = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {meta.title}, Author: {meta.author}, Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

Merging & Splitting

Merge multiple PDFs

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

writer = PdfWriter()
for path in ["a.pdf", "b.pdf", "c.pdf"]:
    for page in PdfReader(path).pages:
        writer.add_page(page)
with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

Split into individual pages

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

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

Extract page range

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages[2:7]:  # pages 3-7 (0-indexed)
    writer.add_page(page)
with open("excerpt.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

Rotating Pages

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
    page.rotate(90)  # 90, 180, 270
    writer.add_page(page)
with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

Creating New PDFs

Simple document with reportlab

pythonCopy code
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, Table, TableStyle, PageBreak
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
from reportlab.lib import colors

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

story.append(Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Title']))
story.append(Spacer(1, 24))
story.append(Paragraph("Body text goes here. " * 10, styles['Normal']))

# Table
data = [["Name", "Score"], ["Alice", "95"], ["Bob", "87"]]
t = Table(data, colWidths=[200, 100])
t.setStyle(TableStyle([
    ('BACKGROUND', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.HexColor('#333333')),
    ('TEXTCOLOR', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.white),
    ('GRID', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 0.5, colors.grey),
    ('FONTSIZE', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 10),
]))
story.append(t)
story.append(PageBreak())
story.append(Paragraph("Page 2 content", styles['Heading1']))

doc.build(story)

CRITICAL: Subscripts and superscripts in reportlab

Never use Unicode subscript/superscript characters (₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉, ⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹) — built-in fonts render them as black boxes.

Use XML markup in Paragraph objects instead:

pythonCopy code
Paragraph("H<sub>2</sub>O and x<super>2</super>", styles['Normal'])

Watermarks & Security

Add watermark

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf").pages[0]
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 f:
    writer.write(f)

Password protection

pythonCopy code
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
    writer.add_page(page)
writer.encrypt("userpass", "ownerpass")
with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

OCR for Scanned PDFs

pythonCopy code
import pytesseract
from pdf2image import convert_from_path

images = convert_from_path("scanned.pdf")
text = "\n\n".join(
    f"--- Page {i+1} ---\n{pytesseract.image_to_string(img)}"
    for i, img in enumerate(images)
)

Requires: pip install pytesseract pdf2image and system packages tesseract-ocr, poppler-utils.

CLI Quick Reference

bashCopy code
# Text extraction (poppler-utils)
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt       # preserve layout
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf output.txt     # pages 1-5

# Merge (qpdf)
qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf b.pdf -- merged.pdf

# Split page range
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- first5.pdf

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

# Decrypt
qpdf --password=PASS --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf

# Extract images (poppler-utils)
pdfimages -j input.pdf prefix    # outputs prefix-000.jpg, etc.