PDF Analysis and Editing

--- 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) ``bash # 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** `python 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)** `bash # 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** `python 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** `bash # Using wkhtmltopdf wkhtmltopdf input.html output.pdf # Or with Python python3 -c " import pdfkit pdfkit.from_file('input.html', 'output.pdf') " ` ## Merging PDFs `python 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 `python 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 1. **Always check if tools are installed** before using them 2. **Handle encoding issues** - PDFs may contain various character encodings 3. **Large PDFs**: Process page by page to avoid memory issues 4. **OCR for scanned PDFs**: Use pytesseract` if text extraction returns empty