pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preserved and to detect tables via page.extract_tables(). For simple text extraction, pypdf's page.extract_text() or the pdftotext command-line tool also work.

First run check_fillable_fields.py to detect form fields. Fillable PDFs are completed with fill_fillable_fields.py using extracted field IDs, while non-fillable PDFs are filled with text annotations via 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 renders pages to images quickly.

Scanned PDFs contain images, not 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.