Process and Generate PDF Documents

This skill covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command-line tools, functioning as a quick-reference guide for common document tasks. With pypdf it handles basic operations - reading and extracting text, merging multiple files, splitting a PDF into one file per page, reading metadata (title, author, subject, creator), and rotating pages:

from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]:
    reader = PdfReader(pdf_file)
    for page in reader.pages:
        writer.add_page(page)

with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)

With pdfplumber it extracts text with layout preserved and pulls tables out of pages, including converting extracted tables into pandas DataFrames and exporting them to Excel. With reportlab it builds new PDFs from scratch, either drawing directly onto a canvas or composing multi-page documents with Platypus (SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, PageBreak).

On the command line it uses pdftotext (from poppler-utils) for text extraction with optional layout preservation and page-range selection, qpdf for merging, splitting, rotating, and removing password protection, and pdftk as an alternative for merge/split/rotate. Additional common tasks covered include OCR on scanned PDFs (converting pages to images with pdf2image then running pytesseract, which requires installing both packages first), applying a watermark by merging a watermark page onto every page, extracting embedded images with pdfimages -j (writing sequentially numbered JPEG files), and adding password protection with pypdf's encrypt method, which accepts a separate user password and owner password.

Use this skill when merging, splitting, extracting text or tables from, creating, watermarking, OCR'ing, or password-protecting PDF files programmatically. For filling out PDF forms specifically, the skill defers to a separate forms.md reference rather than covering it here; for advanced pypdfium2 usage, JavaScript libraries (pdf-lib), troubleshooting guides, and more detailed examples, it defers to reference.md.

Use this skill only when the task clearly matches the scope described above - it is not a substitute for environment-specific validation, testing, or expert review, and you should stop and ask for clarification if required inputs, permissions, or success criteria are missing.

Inputs are PDF files (including scanned/image-based PDFs for OCR) and, for creation tasks, text content. Outputs are processed PDFs (merged, split, rotated, watermarked, encrypted), extracted text or tables, or newly generated PDF documents. A quick-reference table maps each task to its recommended tool: pypdf for merge/split, pdfplumber for text/table extraction, reportlab for creation, qpdf for command-line merging, and pytesseract for OCR.

Developers who need to programmatically manipulate PDF documents - merging, splitting, extracting content, generating reports, or running OCR - as part of a document processing pipeline or one-off script.