pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preserved and to detect tables via page.extract_tables(). For basic text and metadata, pypdf's PdfReader works, and pdftotext from poppler-utils is a fast command-line option.

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, determine coordinates and add text annotations with fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py.

pypdf handles merging and splitting through PdfWriter and PdfReader by adding pages and writing output files. The qpdf command-line tool is an alternative that supports complex page ranges and batch splitting.

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

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.