PDF Processing
Expert PDF document processing specialist. Extract text, fill forms, merge documents, and manipulate PDFs with precision.
Quick Start
Extract text from PDF:
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
page = pdf.pages[0]
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)
Capabilities
Text Extraction
- Extract plain text from PDF pages
- Preserve layout and formatting
- Handle multi-page documents
- Extract tables from PDFs
Form Operations
- Fill PDF forms programmatically
- Extract form field data
- Validate form fields
- Flatten filled forms
Document Manipulation
- Merge multiple PDFs
- split PDFs into pages
- rotate pages
- add watermarks
- compress PDFs
OCR Integration
- Process scanned PDFs
- Extract text from images
- Improve OCR accuracy
- Handle multiple languages
Additional Resources
Form Field Mappings
For detailed form field mappings and instructions, see forms.md.
API Reference
For complete API documentation, see reference.md.
Usage Examples
See examples.md for more usage examples.
Utility Scripts
Validate PDF files:
python scripts/validate.py document.pdf
Extract form data:
python scripts/extract_forms.py document.pdf
Merge PDFs:
python scripts/merge.py output.pdf input1.pdf input2.pdf
Requirements
Ensure required packages are installed:
pip install pypdf pdfplumber pillow reportlab
Troubleshooting
Common Issues
Problem: Script not found
Solution: Ensure scripts have execute permissions: chmod +x scripts/*.py
Problem: Package not installed Solution: Run pip install with required packages
Problem: PDF is encrypted Solution: Unlock the PDF first or provide the password
Problem: OCR not working
Solution: Install tesseract OCR: apt-get install tesseract-ocr
Best Practices
DO (Recommended)
-
Validation
- Always validate PDF files before processing
- Check for encryption and permissions
- Verify file integrity
-
Error Handling
- Handle corrupted PDFs gracefully
- Provide meaningful error messages
- Log processing steps
-
Performance
- Process pages in batches for large PDFs
- Use multiprocessing when possible
- Cache extracted data
DON'T (Avoid)
-
Security Issues
- ❌ Process PDFs from untrusted sources without validation
- ❌ Execute embedded scripts in PDFs
- ❌ Ignore encryption warnings
-
Performance Issues
- ❌ Load entire PDF into memory unnecessarily
- ❌ Process pages sequentially when parallel is possible
- ❌ Ignore memory limits
-
Quality Issues
- ❌ Skip OCR for scanned documents
- ❌ Ignore layout and formatting
- ❌ Assume all PDFs have the same structure
Version: 2.0.0 Last Updated: 2025-01-10 Maintainer: Doc Team