pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preserved and to detect tables via page.extract_tables(). For plain text only, pdftotext from poppler-utils is faster, and results can be converted to pandas DataFrames or Excel files.

First run check_fillable_fields.py to detect fillable fields. For fillable PDFs, extract field info and use fill_fillable_fields.py with a JSON of values; for non-fillable PDFs, add text annotations at computed coordinates using fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py.

pypdf handles merging, splitting, rotating, and encryption. pdfplumber is best for text and table extraction with layout. reportlab creates new PDFs from scratch, while pypdfium2 handles fast page rendering to images.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard parsers fail. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run OCR with pytesseract to produce searchable text.

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

Use qpdf: merge with 'qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf' and split page ranges with 'qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- out.pdf'. pdftk offers similar cat and burst operations if installed.