Best Python Libraries for Working with PDFs

Introduction

• Overview of tutorial on popular and easy-to-use Python libraries for working with PDFs.
• Details available at poppythonology.eu.
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Libraries Covered

• PiPDF
• PDFPlumber
• PyMuPDF

PiPDF

• Versions: PiPDF2, PiPDF4.
• Installation: pip install PyPDF
• Basic Usage:
  • Import and create reader object
  • Example: Extracting text and images from PDF
  • Commands: from PyPDF2 import PdfReader reader = PdfReader('file.pdf') length = len(reader.pages) page = reader.pages[0] text = page.extract_text() for page in reader.pages: text = page.extract_text()
  • Extract Images: Iterating over page.images and saving them. for image in page.images: with open(image.name, 'wb') as f: f.write(image.data)

PDFPlumber

• Focus: Extracting tables
• Installation: pip install pdfplumber
• Basic Usage:
  • Open PDF and extract tables
  • Commands: import pdfplumber with pdfplumber.open('file.pdf') as f: for page in f.pages: tables = page.extract_table()

PyMuPDF (Fitz)

• Focus: Extracting metadata, table of contents, converting to images, and links
• Installation: pip install pymupdf
• Basic Usage:
  • Create document object and explore methods available
  • Commands: import fitz doc = fitz.open('file.pdf') page_count = doc.page_count metadata = doc.metadata page = doc.load_page(0) text = page.get_text() pix = page.get_pixmap() pix.save(f'page_{page.number}.png') links = page.get_links()

Conclusion

• Check poppythonology.eu for more details and code snippets.
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