pdf

Use pdfplumber's extract_tables() method on each page to detect table structures and return rows as lists. You can convert the results into pandas DataFrames and export them to Excel or CSV for further analysis.

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 your values. For non-fillable PDFs, define bounding boxes in fields.json and add text annotations.

Use pdfplumber for text and table extraction, pypdf for merging, splitting, rotating, and encryption, and reportlab for creating new PDFs. For rendering pages to images, pypdfium2 or pdf2image work well.

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

Use qpdf with the --empty --pages syntax to merge multiple files or extract page ranges. Alternatively, pypdf's PdfWriter can merge documents and write each page to a separate file for splitting.

Some viewers fail to render form values without appearance streams. The fill_fillable_fields.py script calls set_need_appearances_writer(True) so viewers regenerate field appearances, though some may show a save-changes dialog.