pdf

Use pdfplumber to extract text with layout preservation and tables via page.extract_text() and 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 fillable fields. For fillable PDFs, extract field info and use fill_fillable_fields.py with a JSON of values. For non-fillable PDFs, extract form structure, define bounding boxes, and fill with text annotations.

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, and encryption, while pdfplumber specializes in extracting text and tables with precise layout and coordinate information. They are often used together.

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than 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 those characters render as solid boxes. Use the <sub> and <super> XML markup tags inside Paragraph objects instead.

Use qpdf: merge with 'qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf' and split page ranges with 'qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- output.pdf'. pdftk offers similar cat and burst operations.