pdf

Use pypdf's PdfWriter to combine PDFs by adding pages from each source file with writer.add_page, then write the result to a new file. Alternatively, run qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf from the command line.

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_tables() method, which detects table structures and returns rows as lists. You can convert the results to pandas DataFrames and export them to Excel for further analysis.

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

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard parsers return nothing. Convert pages to images with pdf2image and run OCR with pytesseract to recover the text content.

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

Run qpdf --password=yourpassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf from the command line. In Python, call reader.decrypt("password") on a pypdf PdfReader before accessing its pages.