pdf

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_tables() method to detect and extract tables from each PDF page. The results can be loaded into pandas DataFrames and exported to Excel, with custom table settings available for complex layouts.

Convert the PDF pages to PNG images, visually identify field locations, and define entry bounding boxes in a fields.json file. Then validate the boxes with check_bounding_boxes.py and add text annotations using fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, encryption, and form field updates. pdfplumber specializes in extracting text with layout and detecting tables, making it better for data extraction tasks.

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 content.

Use qpdf with the --empty --pages syntax to merge files or select page ranges, and --split-pages to divide a document into groups. pdftk and pypdf offer equivalent merge and split operations.

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 this may trigger a save-changes prompt.