pdf

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 or CSV for further analysis.

Use pypdf's PdfWriter to add pages from each source PDF and write the combined output, or run qpdf with the --empty --pages flags from the command line. Both approaches preserve page order.

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 bounding boxes using the fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py script.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text, so standard extraction fails. 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 tags inside Paragraph objects instead.

Run qpdf with the --password and --decrypt flags to produce a decrypted copy, or call reader.decrypt() in pypdf before reading pages. You must know the existing password.