pdf

Use pypdf's PdfWriter to combine PDFs by adding pages from each source file with writer.add_page, then write the output. Alternatively, run qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf from the command line.

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_tables() method to detect and extract tables from each page. The results can be loaded into pandas DataFrames and exported to Excel for further analysis.

Extract the form structure with pdfplumber to get label and line coordinates, or estimate positions visually from rendered page images. Then add text annotations at those coordinates using the fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py script after validating bounding boxes.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard extraction fails. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run pytesseract OCR on each image to recover the text content.

ReportLab's built-in fonts lack Unicode subscript and superscript glyphs, so those characters render as solid boxes. Use the <sub> and <super> XML markup tags inside Paragraph objects instead.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, encryption, and form field updates. pdfplumber specializes in content extraction with precise layout coordinates, making it better for text and table extraction.