pdf

name pdf description Process PDF files - extract text, create PDFs, merge documents. Use when user asks to read PDF, create PDF, or work with PDF files. PDF Processing Skill You now have expertise in PDF manipulation. Follow these workflows: Reading PDFs Option 1: Quick text extraction (preferred) # Using pdftotext (poppler-utils) pdftotext input.pdf - # Output to stdout pdftotext input.pdf output.txt # Output to file # If pdftotext not available, try: python3 -c " import fitz # PyMuPDF doc = fitz.open('input.pdf') for page in doc: print(page.get_text()) " Option 2: Page-by-page with metadata import fitz # pip install pymupdf doc = fitz. open ( "input.pdf" ) print ( f"Pages: { len (doc)} " ) print ( f"Metadata: {doc.metadata} " ) for i, page in enumerate (doc): text = page.get_text() print ( f"--- Page {i+ 1 } ---" ) print (text) Creating PDFs Option 1: From Markdown (recommended) # Using pandoc pandoc input.md -o output.pdf # With custom styling pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex -V geometry:margin=1in Option 2: Programmatically from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas c = canvas.Canvas( "output.pdf" , pagesize=letter) c.drawString( 100 , 750 , "Hello, PDF!" ) c.save() Option 3: From HTML # Using wkhtmltopdf wkhtmltopdf input.html output.pdf # Or with Python python3 -c " import pdfkit pdfkit.from_file('input.html', 'output.pdf') " Merging PDFs import fitz result = fitz. open () for pdf_path in [ "file1.pdf" , "file2.pdf" , "file3.pdf" ]: doc = fitz. open (pdf_path) result.insert_pdf(doc) result.save( "merged.pdf" ) Splitting PDFs import fitz doc = fitz. open ( "input.pdf" ) for i in range ( len (doc)): single = fitz. open () single.insert_pdf(doc, from_page=i, to_page=i) single.save( f"page_ {i+ 1 } .pdf" ) Key Libraries Task Library Install Read/Write/Merge PyMuPDF pip install pymupdf Create from scratch ReportLab pip install reportlab HTML to PDF pdfkit pip install pdfkit + wkhtmltopdf Text extraction pdftotext brew install poppler / apt install poppler-utils Best Practices Always check if tools are installed before using them Handle encoding issues - PDFs may contain various character encodings Large PDFs : Process page by page to avoid memory issues OCR for scanned PDFs : Use pytesseract if text extraction returns empty