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# 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. ## Prerequisites Python dependencies are resolved automatically by `uv run` — every script declares them in its PEP 723 header. Some workflows also need system tools: - **poppler** (`brew install poppler` / `apt-get install poppler-utils`) — provides `pdftoppm` and `pdftotext`; required by the form-filling workflow, which converts PDF pages to images via pdf2image - **tesseract** (`brew install tesseract tesseract-lang`) — only for OCR on scanned documents (see [ocr.md](ocr.md)) - **qpdf** (`brew install qpdf`) — only for the command-line recipes in the qpdf section below ## 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 from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader writer = PdfWriter() for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]: reader = PdfReader(pdf_file) for page in reader.pages: writer.add_page(page) with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output: writer.write(output) ``` #### Split PDF ``...