PDF Processing Guide

---
name: pdf
description: Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting PDFs, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable. If the user mentions a .pdf file or asks to produce one, use this skill.
license: Proprietary. LICENSE.txt has complete terms
---
# 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.

## Quick Start

```python
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

# Read a PDF
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

# Extract text
text = ""
for page in reader.pages:
    text += page.extract_text()
```

## Python Libraries

### pypdf - Basic Operations

**Merge PDFs**

```python
writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf"]:
    reader = PdfReader(pdf_file)
    for page in reader.pages:
        writer.add_page(page)
with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)
```

### pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction

Use `scripts/extract_form_structure.py` to dump the field tree before filling a form, and `scripts/check_bounding_boxes.py` to validate placement afterwards.

## Command-Line Tools

- `pdftotext -layout in.pdf out.txt` keeps column layout
- `qpdf --decrypt --password=… in.pdf out.pdf` strips owner encryption
- `gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` compresses for email

## Scanned PDFs

Run OCR (`ocrmypdf --skip-text`) first; the extraction recipes above only see the text layer.