pdf

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_text() for layout-aware text and page.extract_tables() for tables, which can be loaded into pandas DataFrames. For simple text extraction, pypdf's page.extract_text() or the pdftotext command-line tool also work.

Extract the form structure with pdfplumber to get label and line coordinates, or convert pages to images and estimate positions visually. Then add FreeText annotations at those bounding boxes using pypdf, after validating the boxes for overlaps and sufficient height.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, encryption, and form field updates. pdfplumber focuses on content extraction, providing precise character coordinates and table detection for analysis tasks.

Scanned PDFs contain images without a text layer, so standard parsers return nothing. Convert pages to images with pdf2image, then run pytesseract OCR on each image 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 tags inside Paragraph objects instead of Unicode characters.

Use qpdf with --empty --pages to merge files and page ranges to split them, such as qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- out.pdf. The pdftk tool offers similar cat and burst operations if installed.