PDF Processing Guide

Problem Addressed

PDF files in office automation are often unstructured: merging, splitting, extracting text or tables, generating simple reports, adding watermarks, and protecting files are not well suited to manual workflows or a single GUI. This skill provides an engineer-oriented PDF processing path based on Python and command-line tools, focusing on repeatable, scriptable document tasks.

How It Works

• Basic document operations: use pypdf for merging, splitting, extracting metadata, and rotating pages.
• Content extraction: use pdfplumber to extract layout-aware text and tables, which helps convert PDF information into structured data.
• Document creation: use reportlab with Canvas or Platypus to generate single-page or multi-page PDFs.
• Command-line support: use tools such as pdftotext and qpdf for batch text conversion, merging, and related operations.
• Scanned documents and common tasks: convert scans to images and use pytesseract for OCR, with coverage for watermarks, password protection, and similar scenarios.
• Forms and advanced use: PDF form filling should follow forms.md, while JavaScript libraries, detailed examples, and troubleshooting content are in reference.md.

Boundaries

This skill is suitable for automation scripts, batch office document processing, and simple PDF generation. It does not replace professional layout tools and does not guarantee results on complex document recognition. For forms, advanced pypdfium2, or pdf-lib usage, follow the corresponding referenced documentation.