PDF

PDF Manipulation Skill

This skill allows you to perform various operations on PDF files using the pypdf library in Python.

Core Capabilities

1. Read Text: Extract text content from PDF pages.
2. Extract Metadata: Read document information (author, title, etc.).
3. Merge PDFs: Combine multiple PDF files into one.
4. Split PDFs: Select specific pages to save as a new PDF.
5. Rotate Pages: Change page orientation.

Dependencies

This skill relies on the pypdf library and its dependencies.

pip install pypdf

Workflows

1. Extracting Text from a PDF

To read text from a PDF file:

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("example.pdf")
number_of_pages = len(reader.pages)
page = reader.pages[0]
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)

2. Merging PDFs

To merge multiple PDFs into a single file:

from pypdf import PdfWriter

merger = PdfWriter()

for pdf in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", "file3.pdf"]:
    merger.append(pdf)

merger.write("merged-pdf.pdf")
merger.close()

3. Extracting Specific Pages

To extract specific pages (e.g., pages 1 and 3 - 0-indexed) into a new file:

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("source.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

# Add page 1 (index 0) and page 3 (index 2)
writer.add_page(reader.pages[0])
writer.add_page(reader.pages[2])

with open("extracted_pages.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

4. Reading Metadata

To access PDF metadata:

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("example.pdf")
meta = reader.metadata

print(f"Title: {meta.title}")
print(f"Author: {meta.author}")
print(f"Producer: {meta.producer}")

Best Practices

• File Paths: Always use absolute paths or verify the current working directory.
• Error Handling: Wrap operations in try/except blocks to handle FileNotFoundError or encrypted/corrupted PDFs.
• Encryption: pypdf can handle encrypted PDFs if the password is known using reader.decrypt('password').

Resources

• pypdf Documentation