Processing Pdfs

A well-organized PDF toolkit that covers the full spectrum from simple merges to OCR on scanned documents. The decision matrix at the top is legitimately useful because it steers you to the right library immediately: pypdf for splitting and metadata, pdfplumber for tables and layout-aware text extraction, reportlab for generation. The recipes are copy-paste ready, which matters when you're debugging why a PDF won't rotate. It explicitly excludes Word docs and spreadsheets, so don't reach for this when handling .docx files. If you work with PDFs regularly and want one place to check before googling library documentation, this does that job.

GitHub stars: 224
last updated: Jun 10, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add telagod/code-abyss --skill processing-pdfs --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

PDF Processing

Essential PDF operations using Python libraries and CLI tools.

Decision Matrix

Task	Best Tool	Reference
Merge / split / metadata / rotate	pypdf	recipes.md
Extract text (layout preserved)	pdfplumber	recipes.md
Extract tables	pdfplumber	recipes.md
Create new PDF	reportlab	recipes.md
Batch CLI ops	qpdf / pdftk	recipes.md
OCR scanned PDFs	pytesseract + pdf2image	advanced.md
Add watermark / extract images / encrypt	pypdf / pdfimages	advanced.md
Fill PDF forms	pdf-lib / pypdf	FORMS.md
Advanced pypdfium2 / pdf-lib JS	—	REFERENCE.md

Quick Start

from pypdf import PdfReader
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")
text = "".join(page.extract_text() for page in reader.pages)