pdf

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

First run check_fillable_fields.py to detect fillable fields. For fillable PDFs, extract field info to JSON and use fill_fillable_fields.py with your values. For non-fillable PDFs, convert pages to images, define bounding boxes in fields.json, validate them, and add text annotations.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, metadata, and encryption. pdfplumber specializes in content extraction, providing text with layout coordinates and table detection. Use both together for complete PDF workflows.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard parsers return nothing. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run OCR with pytesseract to recover the text content.

Use qpdf with the --empty --pages syntax to merge multiple files or extract page ranges. Alternatively, pypdf's PdfWriter can merge documents and write individual pages to separate files in Python.

Some viewers fail to render form values without appearance streams. The fill_fillable_fields.py script calls set_need_appearances_writer(True) so viewers regenerate field appearances, though some may show a save-changes dialog.