Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• PDFTool
  • Requirements
    • Requirements file
    • Sources, ideas from...
• About functionalities of PDFTool
  • About merging
  • About splitting
  • About extraction
  • About getting info
  • About reversing a PDF file

PDFTool

PDFTool is a simple tool to manage pdf files, write in Python 3. With PDFTool you can :
-merge PDF files together
-split a PDF to get a specific page or split all pages of a PDF document
-extract text or image for a document
-get info about a PDF file -reverse pages from a PDF file

Requirements

PDFTool use the following python modules :

• os to launch system command
• re to use regex search (in getInfo function)
• glob to find all PDF files if a folder is gived in source (glob.glob(f"{src}/*.pdf") for example in mergeTool function)
• argparse to parse arguments in command line
• PyPDF2 to have fun with PDF files
• fitz to extract pictures and text from PDF
• Path from pathlib to get parent folder of a file
• filetemp to detected temporary folder (OS distribution dependency)

Requirements file

PyPDF2==1.26.0
PyMuPDF==1.14.16

Just run pip3 install -r requirements.txt to install all modules needed by PDFTool

Sources, ideas from...

• https://indianpythonista.wordpress.com/2017/01/10/working-with-pdf-files-in-python/
• https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/working-with-pdf-files-in-python/
• http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2018/04/10/extracting-pdf-metadata-and-text-with-python/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2693820/extract-images-from-pdf-without-resampling-in-python (post 15)
• https://pymupdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/

Thanks to all people, from JeSappelleRoot

About functionalities of PDFTool

About merging

The merging function in PDFTool allow to merge many PDF files in a simple output file.

The source must be a folder and not a single file. PDFTool will find all PDF files with .pdf extension (using Glob module). The output file must be a valid PDF file (with the right extension).

Be sure your files are sorted and organized. PDFTool will merge files successively, in alphabetical order

Usage examples :
PDFTool.py merge --mergeIn /home/Doe/source --mergeOut /home/Doe/result.pdf

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] Adding file1.pdf for merging
[+] Adding file2.pdf for merging
[+] Adding file3.pdf for merging
[+] Adding file4.pdf for merging
[+] Adding file5.pdf for merging

[+] Successfully writed /home/Doe/result.pdf

About splitting

PDFTool can split a specific page of a PDF file. You can also use the keyword all to specify at PDFTool you want to extract all pages in single PDF.

Usage examples :

• Split and extract the 3th page of a document
  PDFTool.py split --splitIn /home/Doe/file.pdf --splitOut /home/Doe/resultFolder/ --num 3
• Split all pages of a document
  PDFTool.py split --splitIn /home/Doe/file.pdf --splitOut /home/Doe/resultFolder/ --num all

PDFTool will automaticly named the extract page by number of the needed page :
-Page_2.pdf for the 2nd page
-Page_5.pdf for the 5th page

The --splitOut argument must be a destination folder The split function can't work with entire folder, which contains multiple PDF files

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_1.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_2.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_3.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_4.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_5.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_6.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_7.pdf
[+] Successfully write /home/Doe/destination/Page_8.pdf

About extraction

PDFTool can extract text or images from a PDF file.
The extraction of text does not work with all PDF, depend of the construction of the file. The layout may not be respected when extract text.
The image extraction use the page number and the image number (in the targeted page) to get the output name file.

When you want extract image, you must specify a destionation folder When you want extract text to a custom file (TXT in example), you must specify a destination file, not a folder

Usage examples :

• extract text from a PDF file PDFTool.py extract --extType text --extIn /home/Doe/source/file.pdf --extOut /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
• extract images from a PDF file
  PDFTool.py extract --extType img --extIn /home/Doe/source/file.pdf --extOut /home/Doe/destination/

Text extraction

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] Text from page 1 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
[+] Text from page 2 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
[+] Text from page 3 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
[+] Text from page 4 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
[+] Text from page 5 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt
[+] Text from page 6 writted to /home/Doe/destination/output.txt

[...]

Image extraction

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page2_Image0.png
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page2_Image1.png
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page4_Image0.png
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page4_Image1.png
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page4_Image2.png
[+] Write /home/Doe/destination/Page5_Image0.png


[...]

About getting info

PDFTool can extract information about a PDF file.
PyPDF2 module with PdfFileReader give getDocumentInfo() method. We can use it to extract many informations like :

• Author
• Title
• Producer
• ...

But this method seems to be incomplete. So, with a dictionnary we can get all infos about a document.

Usage examples :

• Get info about a single file and dump the result to a TXT file
  PDFTool.py info --infoIn /home/Doe/file.pdf --infoOut /home/Doe/infos.txt
• Get info about multiple files in a directory and display it in the console
  PDFTool.py info --infoIn /home/Doe/files/

By default, the info functionality make the output directly in the console

Console output (default behaviour)

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


Informations about file.pdf
==================================
Author ?
Title ?
Subject ?
Creator : 'LaTeX with hyperref'
Producer : 'pdfTeX-1.40.19'
Keywords ?
CreationDate : "D:20190212124237+01'00'"
ModDate : "D:20190212124237+01'00'"
Trapped : '/False'
PTEX : 'This is pdfTeX
Version ?
Total number of pages in document : 12
--------------------------------------

Dump information to file

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] Info successfully dumped to /home/scratch/destination/file.txt

About reversing a PDF file

PDFTool can reverse a PDF file.
A PDF file with pages 1, 2 and 3 will be reversed with pages 3, 2 and 1

Usage example :
PDFTool.py reverse --reverseIn /home/Doe/input.pdf --reverseOut /home/Doe/output.pdf

PDFTool will detected default temporary directory with tempfile.gettempdir() method. Each pages will be extracted in a temporary PDF file and finally merged but from the last page to the first page.

All the temporary PDF files are deleted after merging (only if file is valid for merging

  _____  _____  ______ _______          _
 |  __ \|  __ \|  ____|__   __|        | |
 | |__) | |  | | |__     | | ___   ___ | |
 |  ___/| |  | |  __|    | |/ _ \ / _ \| |
 | |    | |__| | |       | | (_) | (_) | |
 |_|    |_____/|_|       |_|\___/ \___/|_|


    
[+] 7 pages detected in PDF file /home/Doe/input.pdf
  - Writting page 0 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_0.pdf
  - Writting page 1 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_1.pdf
  - Writting page 2 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_2.pdf
  - Writting page 3 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_3.pdf
  - Writting page 4 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_4.pdf
  - Writting page 5 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_5.pdf
  - Writting page 6 in temporary file /tmp/reverse_temp_6.pdf
[+] Successfuly created reversed file /home/Doe/output.pdf