pdf

PDF Manipulation Skill

Comprehensive guide for working with PDF files in Python, covering extraction, manipulation, creation, and advanced operations using progressive disclosure for efficiency.

Core Capabilities

Extract and manipulate PDF content:

• Extract text with layout preservation
• Extract tables and parse structured data
• Fill PDF forms programmatically
• Merge multiple PDFs into a single document
• Split PDFs by pages or ranges
• Create PDFs from scratch with text, images, and graphics
• Add watermarks and annotations
• Extract and modify metadata (author, title, keywords)
• Add password protection and encryption
• Perform OCR on scanned documents
• Convert images to PDF
• Compress and optimize PDF files
• Extract images from PDFs
• Rotate and reorder pages

Quick Start

Install required libraries:

pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab PyMuPDF pdf2image pytesseract pillow

For detailed installation instructions including system dependencies, see:

• [Library Installation Guide](./references/library-installation.md)

Python Libraries Overview

pypdf: Basic operations (merge, split, rotate, metadata) pdfplumber: Advanced text/table extraction with layout awareness reportlab: Create PDFs from scratch (reports, invoices, documents) PyMuPDF (fitz): Advanced manipulation, annotations, compression pdf2image: Convert PDF pages to images (requires poppler) pytesseract: OCR for scanned documents (requires tesseract)

Text Extraction Workflow

Basic Extraction

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
for page in reader.pages:
    text = page.extract_text()
    print(text)

Layout-Aware Extraction

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        text = page.extract_text()
        words = page.extract_words()  # With positioning
        print(text)

Extract from Specific Region

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    page = pdf.pages[0]
    bbox = (0, 0, 612, 100)  # x0, y0, x1, y1
    header = page.crop(bbox).extract_text()

For detailed text extraction methods including OCR fallback and encoding handling, see:

• [Text Extraction Reference](./references/text-extraction.md)

Table Extraction Workflow

Extract All Tables

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("report.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            print(table)

Advanced Table Detection

table_settings = {
    "vertical_strategy": "lines",
    "horizontal_strategy": "lines",
    "snap_tolerance": 3
}

tables = page.extract_tables(table_settings=table_settings)

For detailed table extraction strategies and data cleaning, see:

• [Table Extraction Reference](./references/table-extraction.md)

PDF Form Operations

Fill Form Fields

import fitz

doc = fitz.open("form.pdf")
for page in doc:
    for widget in page.widgets():
        if widget.field_name == "name":
            widget.field_value = "John Doe"
            widget.update()
doc.save("filled.pdf")
doc.close()

Extract Form Field Names

doc = fitz.open("form.pdf")
for page in doc:
    for widget in page.widgets():
        print(f"{widget.field_name}: {widget.field_type_string}")
doc.close()

For form filling, flattening, and debugging, see:

• [PDF Operations Reference](./references/pdf-operations.md)

Merging and Splitting

Merge PDFs

from pypdf import PdfMerger

merger = PdfMerger()
for pdf in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", "file3.pdf"]:
    merger.append(pdf)
merger.write("merged.pdf")
merger.close()

Merge with Page Ranges

merger = PdfMerger()
merger.append("doc1.pdf", pages=(0, 3))  # First 3 pages
merger.append("doc2.pdf")  # All pages
merger.write("compiled.pdf")
merger.close()

Split into Individual Pages

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

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

For merging with bookmarks and splitting by size, see:

• [PDF Operations Reference](./references/pdf-operations.md)

Creating PDFs

Simple Text PDF

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

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.setFont("Helvetica", 12)
c.drawString(50, 750, "Hello, World!")
c.save()

Styled Report

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

doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf")
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
story = []

story.append(Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Title']))
story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
story.append(Paragraph("Content here", styles['BodyText']))

doc.build(story)

PDF with Table

from reportlab.platypus import Table, TableStyle
from reportlab.lib import colors

data = [
    ['Product', 'Quantity', 'Price'],
    ['Widget A', '10', '$50'],
    ['Widget B', '5', '$75']
]

table = Table(data)
table.setStyle(TableStyle([
    ('BACKGROUND', (0, 0), (-1, 0), colors.grey),
    ('GRID', (0, 0), (-1, -1), 1, colors.black)
]))

For complete PDF creation workflows including images, multi-column layouts, and custom fonts, see:

• [PDF Creation Reference](./references/pdf-creation.md)

For practical examples:

• [Invoice Generator](./examples/invoice-generator.md)
• [Report Automation](./examples/report-automation.md)

Metadata and Security

Extract Metadata

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
metadata = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {metadata.get('/Title')}")
print(f"Author: {metadata.get('/Author')}")

Modify Metadata

from pypdf import PdfWriter

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

writer.add_metadata({
    '/Title': 'New Title',
    '/Author': 'John Doe'
})

with open("updated.pdf", 'wb') as f:
    writer.write(f)

Add Password Protection

writer.encrypt(
    user_password="user123",
    owner_password="owner456",
    algorithm="AES-256"
)

For detailed security operations and comprehensive metadata management, see:

• [Metadata, Security, and OCR Reference](./references/metadata-security-ocr.md)

OCR for Scanned Documents

Basic OCR

from pdf2image import convert_from_path
import pytesseract

images = convert_from_path("scanned.pdf")
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
    print(f"Page {i+1}:\n{text}")

Multi-Language OCR

text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang='eng+fra+deu')

For searchable PDF creation and OCR preprocessing, see:

• [Metadata, Security, and OCR Reference](./references/metadata-security-ocr.md)

Watermarks and Annotations

Add Text Watermark

import fitz

doc = fitz.open("document.pdf")
for page in doc:
    page.insert_textbox(
        page.rect,
        "CONFIDENTIAL",
        fontsize=50,
        rotate=45,
        opacity=0.3,
        color=(0.7, 0.7, 0.7)
    )
doc.save("watermarked.pdf")
doc.close()

Add Annotations

page.add_highlight_annot(rect)  # Highlight
page.add_text_annot(point, "Note")  # Text note
page.add_underline_annot(rect)  # Underline

For stamps and image watermarks, see:

• [Metadata, Security, and OCR Reference](./references/metadata-security-ocr.md)

Page Operations

Rotate Pages

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

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

for page in reader.pages:
    page.rotate(90)
    writer.add_page(page)

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

Extract Images

import fitz

doc = fitz.open("document.pdf")
for