Pdf

What This Skill Does

The PDF skill provides tools for processing PDF documents, including merging, splitting, extracting text and metadata, and rotating pages. It leverages Python libraries like pypdf and pdfplumber for basic and advanced operations. This skill is useful for automating PDF-related tasks and extracting information from PDF files.

When to Use

• Merge multiple PDF files into one.
• Split a PDF into individual pages.
• Extract metadata from a PDF document.
• Rotate pages within a PDF file.
• Extract text content with layout using pdfplumber.
• Extract tables from a PDF document.

Key Features

• Uses pypdf for basic PDF operations.
• Supports merging and splitting PDF files.
• Extracts metadata like title, author, and subject.
• Rotates pages clockwise by a specified angle.
• Uses pdfplumber for text and table extraction.
• Provides code examples for common tasks.

Manual Installation

Manual installation

• View Full Skill Content.
• The complete markdown content that gets installed.
• PDF Processing Guide.

Overview

This guide covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command-line tools. For advanced features, JavaScript libraries, and detailed examples, see reference.md. If you need to fill out a PDF form, read forms.md and follow its instructions.

Quick Start

• from pypdf import Pdf.
• Reader, Pdf.
• Writer.

Read a PDF reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

Extract text text = "" for page in reader.pages: text += page.extract_text()

Python Libraries

pypdf - Basic Operations

Merge PDFs

• from pypdf import Pdf.
• Writer, Pdf.
• Reader.

writer = PdfWriter() for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]: reader = PdfReader(pdf_file) for page in reader.pages: writer.add_page(page)

with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Split PDF

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages): writer = PdfWriter() writer.add_page(page) with open(f"page_{i+1}.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Extract Metadata

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") meta = reader.metadata print(f"Title: {meta.title}") print(f"Author: {meta.author}") print(f"Subject: {meta.subject}") print(f"Creator: {meta.creator}")

Rotate Pages

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") writer = PdfWriter()

page = reader.pages[0] page.rotate(90) # Rotate 90 degrees clockwise writer.add_page(page)

with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction

Extract Text with Layout

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf: for page in pdf.pages: text = page.extract_text() print(text)

Extract Tables

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf: for i, page in enumerate(pdf.pages): tables = page.extract_tables() for j, table in enumerate(tables): print(f"Table {j+1} on page {i+1}:") for row in table: print(row)

Advanced Table Extraction

import pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf: all_tables = [] for page in pdf.pages: tables = page.extract_tables() for table in tables: if table: # Check if table is not empty df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0]) all_tables.append(df)

Combine all tables if all_tables: combined_df = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True) combined_df.to_excel("extracted_tables.xlsx", index=False)

reportlab - Create PDFs

Basic PDF Creation

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas. Canvas("hello.pdf", pagesize=letter) width, height = letter

Add text c.drawString(100, height - 100, "Hello World!") c.drawString(100, height - 120, "This is a PDF created with reportlab")

Add a line c.line(100, height - 140, 400, height - 140)

Save c.save()

Create PDF with Multiple Pages

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, PageBreak from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet

doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf", pagesize=letter)

• styles = get.
• Sample.
• Style.
• Sheet().

story = []

Add content title = Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Title']) story.append(title) story.append(Spacer(1, 12))

body = Paragraph("This is the body of the report. " * 20, styles['Normal']) story.append(body) story.append(PageBreak())

Page 2 story.append(Paragraph("Page 2", styles['Heading1'])) story.append(Paragraph("Content for page 2", styles['Normal']))

Build PDF doc.build(story)

Command-Line Tools

pdftotext (poppler-utils)

Extract text

pdftotext input.pdf output.txt

Extract text preserving layout pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt

Extract specific pages pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf output.txt # Pages 1-5

qpdf

Merge PDFs

qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf

Split pages qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- pages1-5.pdf qpdf input.pdf --pages . 6-10 -- pages6-10.pdf

Rotate pages qpdf input.pdf output.pdf --rotate=+90:1 # Rotate page 1 by 90 degrees

Remove password qpdf --password=mypassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf

pdftk (if available)

Merge

pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf

Split pdftk input.pdf burst

Rotate pdftk input.pdf rotate 1east output rotated.pdf

Common Tasks

Extract Text from Scanned PDFs

Requires: pip install pytesseract pdf2image

import pytesseract from pdf2image import convert_from_path

Convert PDF to images images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')

OCR each page text = "" for i, image in enumerate(images): text += f"Page {i+1}:\n" text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image) text += "\n\n"

print(text)

Add Watermark

• from pypdf import Pdf.
• Reader, Pdf.
• Writer.

Create watermark (or load existing) watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf").pages[0]

Apply to all pages reader = PdfReader("document.pdf") writer = PdfWriter()

for page in reader.pages: page.merge_page(watermark) writer.add_page(page)

with open("watermarked.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Extract Images

Using pdfimages (poppler-utils)

pdfimages -j input.pdf output_prefix

This extracts all images as output_prefix-000.jpg, output_prefix-001.jpg, etc.

Password Protection

• from pypdf import Pdf.
• Reader, Pdf.
• Writer.

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf") writer = PdfWriter()

for page in reader.pages: writer.add_page(page)

Add password writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")

with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output)

Quick Reference

Next Steps

For advanced pypdfium2 usage, see reference.md For JavaScript libraries (pdf-lib), see reference.md If you need to fill out a PDF form, follow the instructions in forms.md For troubleshooting guides, see reference.mdPDF Processing Guide