PDF Processing Guide

Essential PDF operations using Python libraries and CLI tools.

Quick start

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
text = "".join(page.extract_text() for page in reader.pages)

Common operations

• Merge / split with PdfWriter — append pages or write out page ranges.
• Rotate pages with page.rotate(90).
• Forms — read field names, then writer.update_page_form_field_values(...).
• Encrypt / decrypt with writer.encrypt(password).
• OCR scanned PDFs (ocrmypdf in.pdf out.pdf) to make them searchable.

Tables

For mixed text + scanned tables, detect table regions per page, normalize rows/columns, merge split cells, and emit structured JSON { page, rows[] }.