name: pdf
description: Extract text and tables from PDFs, fill forms, merge documents, and create new PDFs. Use when working with PDF files or when users mention PDFs, forms, or document extraction.
license: MIT
metadata:
author: thesimpleapp
version: "1.0"

PDF Processing

Work with PDF documents: extract content, fill forms, merge, and create.

Capabilities

Python Libraries

PyPDF2 / pypdf - Basic Operations

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

# Read PDF
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
for page in reader.pages:
    text = page.extract_text()
    print(text)

# Merge PDFs
writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf"]:
    reader = PdfReader(pdf)
    for page in reader.pages:
        writer.add_page(page)
writer.write("merged.pdf")

pdfplumber - Table Extraction

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        # Extract tables
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            for row in table:
                print(row)

reportlab - Create PDFs

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello, World!")
c.save()

JavaScript Libraries

pdf-lib - Modify PDFs

import { PDFDocument } from 'pdf-lib';

// Load existing PDF
const pdfDoc = await PDFDocument.load(existingPdfBytes);

// Add a page
const page = pdfDoc.addPage();
page.drawText('Hello, World!', { x: 50, y: 700 });

// Save
const pdfBytes = await pdfDoc.save();

pdf-parse - Extract Text

const pdf = require('pdf-parse');

const dataBuffer = fs.readFileSync('document.pdf');
const data = await pdf(dataBuffer);
console.log(data.text);

Form Filling

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("form.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
writer.append(reader)

# Fill form fields
writer.update_page_form_field_values(
    writer.pages[0],
    {"name": "John Doe", "email": "[email protected]"}
)
writer.write("filled_form.pdf")

OCR for Scanned PDFs

import pytesseract
from pdf2image import convert_from_path

# Convert PDF to images
images = convert_from_path("scanned.pdf")

# OCR each page
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    text = pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
    print(f"Page {i+1}:\n{text}")

Best Practices

1. Check if scanned - If text extraction returns empty, use OCR
2. Handle encoding - PDFs can have various text encodings
3. Preserve formatting - Tables and layouts may not extract cleanly
4. Large files - Process page-by-page for memory efficiency
5. Validate output - Verify extracted data accuracy