pdflisted

<!-- Generated from https://github.com/nielsmadan/agentic-coding — edits here are overwritten. --> # PDF Processing ## Gotchas - Never use Unicode subscript/superscript characters (₁, ², etc.) in ReportLab PDFs. Built-in fonts don't include these glyphs, rendering them as solid black boxes. - OCR requires the `tesseract` system binary, not just `pip install pytesseract`. On macOS: `brew install tesseract`. - Watermark PDFs must have transparent backgrounds. `merge_page()` composites content — a watermark with a white background will cover the document. ## Instructions ### Step 1: Identify the Operation Determine what the user needs: read/extract text, merge, split, rotate, create, fill forms, OCR, watermark, encrypt/decrypt, or extract images. If the task involves filling a PDF form, read `references/forms.md` and follow its instructions instead of continuing here. ### Step 2: Choose the Right Tool | Task | Best Tool | Command/Code | |------|-----------|--------------| | Merge PDFs | pypdf | `writer.add_page(page)` | | Split PDFs | pypdf | One page per file | | Extract text | pdfplumber | `page.extract_text()` | | Extract tables | pdfplumber | `page.extract_tables()` | | Create PDFs | reportlab | Canvas or Platypus | | Command line merge | qpdf | `qpdf --empty --pages ...` | | OCR scanned PDFs | pytesseract | Convert to image first | | Fill PDF forms | pypdf or annotations (see `references/forms.md`) | See `references/forms.md` | ### Step 3: Execute Use the code patt