Working with PDFs in Python: Reading and Splitting Pages
This article is the first in a series on working with PDFs in Python:
The PDF Document Format
Today, the Portable Document Format (PDF) belongs to the most commonly used data formats. In 1990, the structure of a PDF document was defined by Adobe. The idea behind the PDF format is that transmitted data/documents look exactly the same for both parties that are involved in the communication process – the creator, author or sender, and the receiver. PDF is the successor of the PostScript format, and standardized as ISO 32000-2:2017.
Processing PDF Documents
For Linux there are mighty command line tools available such as pdftk and pdfgrep. As a developer there is a huge excitement building your own software that is based on Python and uses PDF libraries that are freely available.
This article is the beginning of a little series, and will cover these helpful Python libraries. In Part One we will focus on the manipulation of existing PDFs. You will learn how to read and extract the content (both text and images), rotate single pages, and split documents into its individual pages. Part