PDF Toolkit

PDF Toolkit

Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.8+
• Libraries: pypdf, pdfplumber, reportlab
• Optional: pytesseract (for OCR), pdf2image, poppler-utils

Instructions

1. Read and extract text from PDFs

   from pypdf import PdfReader
   reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
   text = ""
   for page in reader.pages:
       text += page.extract_text()
   

2. Merge multiple PDFs

   from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader
   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)
   

3. Split PDF into individual pages

   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)
   

4. Extract tables with pdfplumber

   import pdfplumber
   with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
       for page in pdf.pages:
           tables = page.extract_tables()
           for table in tables:
               for row in table:
                   print(row)
   

5. Create new PDFs with reportlab

   from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
   from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
   c = canvas.Canvas("new.pdf", pagesize=letter)
   c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello World!")
   c.save()
   

6. OCR scanned PDFs

   import pytesseract
   from pdf2image import convert_from_path
   images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')
   for image in images:
       text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
   

Error Handling

• If PDF is password-protected, use PdfReader("file.pdf", password="pass")
• If text extraction fails, try pdfplumber or OCR approach
• For corrupted PDFs, use qpdf to attempt repair

Notes

• Use pypdf for basic operations (merge, split, rotate)
• Use pdfplumber for text/table extraction with layout
• Use reportlab for creating new PDFs programmatically
• Command-line tools: pdftotext, qpdf, pdftk for batch operations

Source: anthropics/skills