Working with PDF files in Python

Last Updated : 21 Jun, 2025

All of you must be familiar with what PDFs are. In fact, they are one of the most important and widely used digital media. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It uses .pdf extension. It is used to present and exchange documents reliably, independent of software, hardware, or operating system.
Invented by Adobe, PDF is now an open standard maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). PDFs can contain links and buttons, form fields, audio, video, and business logic.
In this article, we will learn, how we can do various operations like:

Extracting text from PDF
Rotating PDF pages
Merging PDFs
Splitting PDF
Adding watermark to PDF pages

Installation: Using simple python scripts!
We will be using a third-party module, pypdf.
pypdf is a python library built as a PDF toolkit. It is capable of:

Extracting document information (title, author, …)
Splitting documents page by page
Merging documents page by page
Cropping pages
Merging multiple pages into a single page
Encrypting and decrypting PDF files
and more!

To install pypdf, run the following command from the command line:

pip install pypdf

This module name is case-sensitive, so make sure the y is lowercase and everything else is uppercase. All the code and PDF files used in this tutorial/article are available here.

1. Extracting text from PDF file

Python

# importing required classes from pypdf import PdfReader  # creating a pdf reader object reader = PdfReader('example.pdf')  # printing number of pages in pdf file print(len(reader.pages))  # creating a page object page = reader.pages[0]  # extracting text from page print(page.extract_text())

The output of the above program looks like this:

20
PythonBasics
S.R.Doty
August27,2008
Contents

1Preliminaries
4
1.1WhatisPython?...................................
..4
1.2Installationanddocumentation....................
.........4 [and some more lines...]

Let us try to understand the above code in chunks:

reader = PdfReader('example.pdf')

Here, we create an object of PdfReader class of pypdf module and pass the path to the PDF file & get a PDF reader object.

print(len(reader.pages))

pages property gives the number of pages in the PDF file. For example, in our case, it is 20 (see first line of output).

pageObj = reader.pages[0]

Now, we create an object of PageObject class of pypdf module. PDF reader object has function pages[] which takes page number (starting from index 0) as argument and returns the page object.

print(pageObj.extract_text())

Page object has function extract_text() to extract text from the PDF page.

Note: While PDF files are great for laying out text in a way that’s easy for people to print and read, they’re not straightforward for software to parse into plaintext. As such, pypdf might make mistakes when extracting text from a PDF and may even be unable to open some PDFs at all. It isn’t much you can do about this, unfortunately. pypdf may simply be unable to work with some of your particular PDF files.

2. Rotating PDF pages

Python

# importing the required classes from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter  def PDFrotate(origFileName, newFileName, rotation):      # creating a pdf Reader object     reader = PdfReader(origFileName)      # creating a pdf writer object for new pdf     writer = PdfWriter()      # rotating each page     for page in range(len(reader.pages)):          pageObj = reader.pages[page]         pageObj.rotate(rotation)          # Add the rotated page object to the PDF writer         writer.add_page(pageObj)      # Write the rotated pages to the new PDF file     with open(newFileName, 'wb') as newFile:         writer.write(newFile)    def main():      # original pdf file name     origFileName = 'example.pdf'      # new pdf file name     newFileName = 'rotated_example.pdf'      # rotation angle     rotation = 270      # calling the PDFrotate function     PDFrotate(origFileName, newFileName, rotation)  if __name__ == "__main__":     # calling the main function     main()

Here, you can see how the first page of rotated_example.pdf looks like ( right image) after rotation:

Rotating a pdf file

Some important points related to the above code:

For rotation, we first create a PDF reader object of the original PDF.

writer = PdfWriter()

Rotated pages will be written to a new PDF. For writing to PDFs, we use the object of PdfWriter class of pypdf module.

for page in range(len(pdfReader.pages)):
        pageObj = pdfReader.pages[page]
        pageObj.rotate(rotation)
        writer.add_page(pageObj)

Now, we iterate each page of the original PDF. We get page object by .pages[] method of PDF reader class. Now, we rotate the page by rotate() method of page object class. Then, we add a page to PDF writer object using addage() method of PDF writer class by passing the rotated page object.

newFile = open(newFileName, 'wb')
writer.write(newFile)
newFile.close()

Now, we have to write the PDF pages to a new PDF file. Firstly, we open the new file object and write PDF pages to it using write() method of PDF writer object. Finally, we close the original PDF file object and the new file object.

3. Merging PDF files

Python

# importing required modules from pypdf import PdfWriter   def PDFmerge(pdfs, output):     # creating pdf file writer object     pdfWriter = PdfWriter()      # appending pdfs one by one     for pdf in pdfs:         pdfWriter.append(pdf)      # writing combined pdf to output pdf file     with open(output, 'wb') as f:         pdfWriter.write(f)   def main():     # pdf files to merge     pdfs = ['example.pdf', 'rotated_example.pdf']      # output pdf file name     output = 'combined_example.pdf'      # calling pdf merge function     PDFmerge(pdfs=pdfs, output=output)   if __name__ == "__main__":     # calling the main function     main()

The output of the above program is a combined PDF, combined_example.pdf, obtained by merging example.pdf and rotated_example.pdf.

Let us have a look at important aspects of this program:

pdfWriter = PdfWriter()

For merging, we use a pre-built class, PdfWriter of pypdf module.
Here, we create an object pdfwriter of PDF writer class

 # appending pdfs one by one
 for pdf in pdfs:
       pdfWriter.append(pdf)

Now, we append file object of each PDF to PDF writer object using the append() method.

    # writing combined pdf to output pdf file
    with open(output, 'wb') as f:
          pdfWriter.write(f)

Finally, we write the PDF pages to the output PDF file using write method of PDF writer object.

4. Splitting PDF file

Python

# importing the required modules from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter  def PDFsplit(pdf, splits):     # creating pdf reader object     reader = PdfReader(pdf)      # starting index of first slice     start = 0      # starting index of last slice     end = splits[0]       for i in range(len(splits)+1):         # creating pdf writer object for (i+1)th split         writer = PdfWriter()          # output pdf file name         outputpdf = pdf.split('.pdf')[0] + str(i) + '.pdf'          # adding pages to pdf writer object         for page in range(start,end):             writer.add_page(reader.pages[page])              # writing split pdf pages to pdf file             with open(outputpdf, "wb") as f:                 writer.write(f)              # interchanging page split start position for next split             start = end             try:                 # setting split end position for next split                 end = splits[i+1]             except IndexError:                 # setting split end position for last split                 end = len(reader.pages)   def main():     # pdf file to split     pdf = 'example.pdf'      # split page positions     splits = [2,4]      # calling PDFsplit function to split pdf     PDFsplit(pdf, splits)  if __name__ == "__main__":     # calling the main function     main()

Output will be three new PDF files with split 1 (page 0,1), split 2(page 2,3), split 3(page 4-end).
No new function or class has been used in the above python program. Using simple logic and iterations, we created the splits of passed PDF according to the passed list splits.

5. Adding watermark to PDF pages

Python

# importing the required modules from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter  def add_watermark(wmFile, pageObj):     # creating pdf reader object of watermark pdf file     reader = PdfReader(wmFile)      # merging watermark pdf's first page with passed page object.     pageObj.merge_page(reader.pages[0])      # returning watermarked page object     return pageObj  def main():     # watermark pdf file name     mywatermark = 'watermark.pdf'      # original pdf file name     origFileName = 'example.pdf'      # new pdf file name     newFileName = 'watermarked_example.pdf'      # creating pdf File object of original pdf     pdfFileObj = open(origFileName, 'rb')      # creating a pdf Reader object     reader = PdfReader(pdfFileObj)      # creating a pdf writer object for new pdf     writer = PdfWriter()      # adding watermark to each page     for page in range(len(reader.pages)):         # creating watermarked page object         wmpageObj = add_watermark(mywatermark, reader.pages[page])          # adding watermarked page object to pdf writer         writer.add_page(wmpageObj)      # writing watermarked pages to new file     with open(newFileName, 'wb') as newFile:         writer.write(newFile)      # closing the original pdf file object     pdfFileObj.close()  if __name__ == "__main__":     # calling the main function     main()

Here is how the first page of original (left) and watermarked (right) PDF file looks like:

Watermarking the pdf file

All the process is same as the page rotation example. Only difference is:

wmpageObj = add_watermark(mywatermark, pdfReader.pages[page])

Page object is converted to watermarked page object using add_watermark() function.
Let us try to understand add_watermark() function:

    reader = PdfReader(wmFile)
    pageObj.merge_page(reader.pages[0])
    return pageObj

Foremost, we create a PDF reader object of watermark.pdf. To the passed page object, we use merge_page() function and pass the page object of the first page of the watermark PDF reader object. This will overlay the watermark over the passed page object.

And here we reach the end of this long tutorial on working with PDF files in python.
Now, you can easily create your own PDF manager!
References:

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter13/
https://pypi.org/project/pypdf/

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Working with PDF files in Python

Nikhil Kumar 13

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