PDF

PDF Processing Guide

Overview

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

from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

# Merge PDFs
writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.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)

pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction

import pdfplumber

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

reportlab - Create PDFs

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

c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 700, "Hello World!")
c.save()

Command-Line Tools

# Extract text
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt

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

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

Common Tasks