PDF Processing Pro

Production-ready PDF processing toolkit with pre-built scripts, comprehensive error handling, and support for complex workflows.

Quick start

Extract text from PDF

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    text = pdf.pages[0].extract_text()
    print(text)

Analyse PDF form (using included script)

python scripts/analyze_form.py input.pdf --output fields.json
# Returns: JSON with all form fields, types, and positions

Fill PDF form with validation

python scripts/fill_form.py input.pdf data.json output.pdf
# Validates all fields before filling, includes error reporting

Extract tables from PDF

python scripts/extract_tables.py report.pdf --output tables.csv
# Extracts all tables with automatic column detection

Features

Production-ready scripts

• Error handling with detailed messages and proper exit codes
• Input validation, type checking, and configurable logging
• Full type annotations and CLI interface (--help on all scripts)

Comprehensive workflows

• PDF forms, table extraction, OCR processing
• Batch operations, pre/post-processing validation

Advanced topics

PDF form processing

Complete form workflows including field analysis, dynamic filling, validation rules, multi-page forms, and checkbox/radio handling. See references/forms.md.

Table extraction

Complex table extraction including multi-page tables, merged cells, nested tables, custom detection, and CSV/Excel export. See references/tables.md.

OCR processing

Scanned PDFs and image-based documents including Tesseract integration, language support, image preprocessing, and confidence scoring. See references/ocr.md.

Included scripts

Script	Purpose	Usage
analyze_form.py	Extract form field info	python scripts/analyze_form.py input.pdf [--output fields.json] [--verbose]
fill_form.py	Fill PDF forms with data	python scripts/fill_form.py input.pdf data.json output.pdf [--validate]
validate_form.py	Validate form data before filling	python scripts/validate_form.py data.json schema.json
extract_tables.py	Extract tables to CSV/Excel	python scripts/extract_tables.py input.pdf [--output tables.csv] [--format csv|excel]
extract_text.py	Extract text with formatting	python scripts/extract_text.py input.pdf [--output text.txt] [--preserve-formatting]
merge_pdfs.py	Merge multiple PDFs	python scripts/merge_pdfs.py file1.pdf file2.pdf --output merged.pdf
split_pdf.py	Split PDF into pages	python scripts/split_pdf.py input.pdf --output-dir pages/
validate_pdf.py	Validate PDF integrity	python scripts/validate_pdf.py input.pdf

Dependencies

All scripts require:

pip install pdfplumber pypdf pillow pytesseract pandas

Optional for OCR:

# macOS: brew install tesseract
# Ubuntu: apt-get install tesseract-ocr
# Windows: Download from GitHub releases

References

File	Contents
references/forms.md	Complete form processing guide
references/tables.md	Advanced table extraction
references/ocr.md	Scanned PDF processing
references/workflows.md	Common workflows, error handling, performance tips, best practices
references/troubleshooting.md	Troubleshooting common issues and getting help