pdf

Use pypdf's PdfWriter to merge PDFs by adding each page from the source files with add_page, then write the result to a new file. Alternatively, run qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf from the command line.

Open the PDF with pdfplumber and call page.extract_tables() on each page to get table data as lists of rows. You can load the results into pandas DataFrames and export them to Excel or CSV for analysis.

Extract the form structure with the extract_form_structure.py script to get label and checkbox coordinates, build a fields.json with entry bounding boxes, validate it with check_bounding_boxes.py, then fill it using fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py, which adds text annotations at the specified positions.

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 produce searchable text.

ReportLab's built-in fonts lack Unicode subscript and superscript glyphs, so characters like ₀ render as solid boxes. Use the <sub> and <super> XML tags inside Paragraph objects instead.

Run qpdf --password=yourpassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf to produce an unprotected copy. In Python, call reader.decrypt("password") on a pypdf PdfReader before accessing pages.