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.

Extract the form structure with pdfplumber to get label and checkbox coordinates, or convert pages to images and estimate positions visually. Then add text annotations at those coordinates using pypdf's FreeText annotations.

Scanned PDFs contain images, not text layers, so standard parsers fail. Convert pages to images with pdf2image or pdftoppm, then run OCR with pytesseract to recover the text.

pypdf handles reading, merging, splitting, rotating, and encrypting PDFs. pdfplumber specializes in text and table extraction with coordinates. reportlab is used to create new PDF documents from scratch.

ReportLab's built-in fonts lack Unicode subscript and superscript glyphs, so those characters render as black boxes. Use the <sub> and <super> XML 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 merge and burst operations.