Office Document Processing Workflow

Scriptable PDF processing workflows

When working with office documents, PDFs often need merging, splitting, text and table extraction, watermarking, password protection, and metadata handling. This skill organizes those operations into a practical path centered on Python libraries and command-line tools, reducing ad hoc API lookups.

Core capabilities and workflow

• Basic file operations: use pypdf to merge, split, rotate pages, and read or write metadata.
• Content extraction: use pdfplumber for layout-aware text extraction and table extraction; for scanned PDFs, convert pages to images before OCR.
• PDF generation: create single-page and multi-page documents with reportlab using Canvas or Platypus.
• Command-line support: pair the Python path with pdftotext, qpdf, and optionally pdftk for batch pipelines.

The skill selects tools by task: pypdf for merge and split workflows, pdfplumber for text and table extraction, reportlab for creating new PDFs, and qpdf for command-line batch processing.

Boundaries

It is focused on scriptable PDF operations rather than complex layout design. Form filling, advanced pypdfium2 usage, JavaScript pdf-lib, and troubleshooting require the follow-up references. If the source file is image-based, make the OCR step explicit instead of parsing it as a text-based PDF.