Processing PDFs

Extract text and tables from PDF files, fill forms, and merge documents.

Quick Start

Extract text with pdfplumber:

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        text = page.extract_text()
        print(text)

Features

• •Text extraction: Extract text from any page
• •Table extraction: Extract tables as structured data
• •Form filling: Fill PDF forms programmatically
• •Document merging: Combine multiple PDFs
• •Page manipulation: Split, rotate, and reorder pages
• •Metadata access: Read and modify PDF metadata

Common Operations

Extract All Text

def extract_all_text(pdf_path):
    """Extract all text from a PDF file."""
    import pdfplumber
    
    text_parts = []
    with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
        for page in pdf.pages:
            text = page.extract_text()
            if text:
                text_parts.append(text)
    
    return "\n\n".join(text_parts)

Extract Tables

def extract_tables(pdf_path):
    """Extract all tables from a PDF file."""
    import pdfplumber
    
    all_tables = []
    with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
        for page in pdf.pages:
            tables = page.extract_tables()
            all_tables.extend(tables)
    
    return all_tables

Merge PDFs

def merge_pdfs(pdf_paths, output_path):
    """Merge multiple PDFs into one."""
    from PyPDF2 import PdfMerger
    
    merger = PdfMerger()
    for path in pdf_paths:
        merger.append(path)
    
    merger.write(output_path)
    merger.close()

Configuration

Dependencies

• •pdfplumber - Text and table extraction
• •PyPDF2 - PDF manipulation
• •pdf2image - Convert PDF to images (optional)
• •pytesseract - OCR support (optional)

API Reference

See REFERENCE.md for detailed API documentation.

Examples

See EXAMPLES.md for more usage examples.

Troubleshooting

Text extraction returns empty

1. •Check if the PDF contains actual text (not scanned images)
2. •Enable OCR for scanned documents: ocr_enabled: true
3. •Try different extraction settings

Tables not detected correctly

1. •Use table_strategy: "text" for text-based tables
2. •Adjust table detection settings
3. •Consider manual boundary specification