pdf

Use pypdf's PdfWriter to merge PDFs by iterating over each file's pages with PdfReader and calling add_page, then writing the result to a new file. Alternatively, run qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf from the command line.

First run check_fillable_fields.py to detect AcroForm fields. For fillable PDFs, extract field info to JSON and use fill_fillable_fields.py with a field_values.json file. For flat forms, overlay text annotations using coordinates validated by check_bounding_boxes.py.

pdfplumber provides layout-aware text and table extraction with precise coordinates, making it better for structured data. pypdf handles general page manipulation like merging and encryption but returns None for extract_text on image-only pages.

No, standard parsers return empty results on image-only pages. Convert pages to images with pdf2image and run pytesseract OCR, or use a dedicated OCR skill with pymupdf or marker-pdf for batch structured extraction.

Reportlab's built-in fonts lack glyphs for Unicode subscript and superscript characters like ₀ or ⁰. Use <sub> and <super> markup inside Paragraph objects instead, or manually adjust font size and position for canvas-drawn text.

Run qpdf --password=pw --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf from the command line. In Python, open the file with PdfReader(path, password=...) before accessing its pages, since pypdf preserves encryption flags.