Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms. When Claude needs to fill in a PDF form or programmatically process, generate, or analyze PDF documents at scale.

PDF Processing Guide Overview This guide covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command line tools. For advanced features, JavaScript libraries, and detailed examples, see reference.md. If you need to fill out a PDF form, read forms.md and follow its instructions. Prerequisites Python dependencies are resolved automatically by uv run — every script declares them in its PEP 723 header. Some workflows also need system tools: poppler ( brew install poppler / apt get install poppler utils ) — provides pdftoppm and pdftotext ; required by the form filling workflow, which converts PDF pages to images via pdf2image tesseract ( brew install tesseract tesseract lang ) — only for OCR on scanned documents (see [ocr.md](ocr.md)) qpdf ( brew install qpdf ) — only for the command line recipes in the qpdf section below Quick Start Python Libraries pypdf Basic Operations Merge PDFs Split PDF Extract Metadata Rotate Pages pdfplumber Text and Table Extraction Extract Text with Layout Extract Tables Advanced Table Extraction reportlab Create PDFs Basic PDF Creation Create PDF with Multiple Pages Command Line Tools pdftotext (poppler utils) qpdf pdftk (if available) Common Tasks Extract Text from Scanned PDFs Add Watermark Extract Images Password Protection Quick Reference Task Best Tool Command/Code Merge PDFs pypdf writer.add page(page) Split PDFs pypdf One page per file Extract text pdfplumber page.extract text() Extract tables pdfplumber page.extract tables() Create PDFs reportlab Canvas or Platypus Command line merge qpdf qpdf empty pages ... OCR scanned PDFs pytesseract Convert to image first Fill PDF forms pypdf See forms.md Next Steps Complex table extraction : For multi page tables, borderless tables, and detection tuning, see [tables.md](tables.md) Scanned PDF processing : For OCR with image preprocessing, see [ocr.md](ocr.md) Form filling : For fillable and non fillable PDF forms, see [forms.md](forms.md) Advanced features : For pypdfium2, JavaScript libraries (pdf lib), and troubleshooting, see [reference.md](reference.md)