pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preserved and to detect tables via page.extract_tables(). For simple text extraction, pypdf's page.extract_text() or the pdftotext command-line tool also work.

First run check_fillable_fields.py to detect fillable fields. Fillable forms are completed with fill_fillable_fields.py using a JSON of field values; non-fillable forms are filled with text annotations via fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py after determining coordinates.

pypdf handles merging, splitting, rotating, and encryption. pdfplumber specializes in text and table extraction with layout coordinates. pypdfium2, a PDFium binding, is used for fast page rendering to images.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard parsers fail. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run OCR with pytesseract 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.

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