Qpdf

PDF — Comprehensive PDF Processing Guide

Quick Reference

Task	Tool	Command/Code
Extract text	pdfplumber	page.extract_text()
Extract tables	pdfplumber	page.extract_tables()
Merge	pypdf	writer.add_page(page)
Split	pypdf	Create files per page
Generate	reportlab	Canvas or Platypus
CLI merge	qpdf	qpdf --empty --pages ...
OCR	pytesseract	PDF→image→OCR
Fill forms	pypdf / pdf-lib	See FORMS.md

Text & Table Extraction

pdfplumber (Recommended)

import pdfplumber

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

        # Tables
        for table in page.extract_tables():
            for row in table:
                print(row)

Table → Excel Conversion

import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    all_tables = []
    for page in pdf.pages:
        for table in page.extract_tables():
            if table:
                df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
                all_tables.append(df)

    if all_tables:
        combined = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True)
        combined.to_excel("extracted.xlsx", index=False)

Metadata

from pypdf import PdfReader
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
meta = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {meta.title}, Author: {meta.author}")

Merge & Split

Merge

from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

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

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

Split

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages):
    writer = PdfWriter()
    writer.add_page(page)
    with open(f"page_{i+1}.pdf", "wb") as f:
        writer.write(f)

Page Rotation

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
page = reader.pages[0]
page.rotate(90)  # Clockwise 90 degrees
writer.add_page(page)
with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

PDF Generation

Basic Generation (reportlab)

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter, A4
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=A4)
width, height = A4
c.drawString(100, height - 100, "Hello World!")
c.save()

Report Generation (Platypus)

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import A4
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, PageBreak
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet

doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf", pagesize=A4)
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
story = []

story.append(Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Title']))
story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
story.append(Paragraph("Body content here. " * 20, styles['Normal']))
story.append(PageBreak())
story.append(Paragraph("Page 2", styles['Heading1']))

doc.build(story)

Note: Do not use Unicode subscripts/superscripts in ReportLab. Use <sub>, <super> tags instead.

Watermark

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf").pages[0]
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

for page in reader.pages:
    page.merge_page(watermark)
    writer.add_page(page)

with open("watermarked.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

Encryption & Decryption

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

# Encrypt
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in PdfReader("input.pdf").pages:
    writer.add_page(page)
writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")
with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

# CLI decrypt
qpdf --password=mypassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf

OCR (Scanned Documents)

import pytesseract
from pdf2image import convert_from_path

images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image, lang='eng+kor')
    print(f"Page {i+1}:\n{text}\n")

Image Extraction

# Poppler tools
pdfimages -j input.pdf output_prefix
# Result: output_prefix-000.jpg, output_prefix-001.jpg, ...

CLI Tools

# pdftotext — Extract text
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt    # Preserve layout
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf output.txt  # Pages 1-5 only

# qpdf — Merge/split
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- first5.pdf
qpdf input.pdf output.pdf --rotate=+90:1  # Rotate page 1

Dependencies

Tool	Install	Purpose
pypdf	pip install pypdf	Merge, split, encrypt
pdfplumber	pip install pdfplumber	Text & table extraction
reportlab	pip install reportlab	PDF generation
pytesseract	pip install pytesseract pdf2image	OCR
poppler	brew install poppler	pdftotext, pdfimages
qpdf	brew install qpdf	CLI merge/split