hive.pdf

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_tables() method to detect and extract tables from each PDF page. The results can be converted into pandas DataFrames and combined across pages, then exported to Excel with to_excel().

Use pypdf's PdfWriter and PdfReader classes: add pages from multiple readers to one writer to merge, or write each page to a separate file to split. The qpdf command-line tool also handles merging and page-range splitting.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text, so use pdf2image to convert pages to images and pytesseract to OCR each image into text. Standard parsers like pypdf cannot read text from scanned documents directly.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, metadata, and encryption. pdfplumber specializes in content extraction, providing text with layout coordinates and table detection that pypdf does not offer.

ReportLab's built-in fonts lack Unicode subscript and superscript glyphs, so characters like H₂O render as solid boxes. Use the <sub> and <super> XML markup tags inside Paragraph objects instead.

Use pypdf's writer.encrypt() with user and owner passwords to protect a PDF, or qpdf with --encrypt for command-line encryption. To decrypt, call reader.decrypt(password) in pypdf or use qpdf --decrypt with the password.