pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout and tables from PDF pages via page.extract_text() and page.extract_tables(). Extracted tables can be loaded into pandas DataFrames and exported to Excel or CSV.

Extract the form structure with pdfplumber to get label and checkbox coordinates, or convert pages to images and estimate positions visually. Then add text annotations at those bounding boxes using pypdf FreeText annotations.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, encrypting, and form field updates. pdfplumber focuses on content extraction, providing text with layout coordinates and table detection.

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.

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 in Paragraph objects instead.

Use qpdf with the --empty --pages syntax to merge files or select page ranges for splitting. pdftk and pypdf offer equivalent merge and split operations if qpdf is unavailable.