pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preserved and tables via page.extract_tables(), which returns rows you can load into pandas DataFrames. For simple text extraction, pypdf's page.extract_text() or the pdftotext command-line tool also work.

Extract the form structure with pdfplumber to get label and checkbox coordinates, define entry bounding boxes in a fields.json file, validate them with the check_bounding_boxes script, then add text annotations using pypdf's FreeText annotations.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, encrypting, and form field updates. pdfplumber focuses on content extraction, providing precise character coordinates and table detection for data extraction tasks.

Scanned PDFs contain images without a text layer, so standard parsers return nothing. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run pytesseract OCR on each image to produce searchable text.

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 of Unicode characters.

Use qpdf: merge with 'qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf' and split page ranges with 'qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- output.pdf'. The pdftk tool offers equivalent cat and burst operations.