PDF Processing Guide

IMPORTANT: Do NOT Use the Read Tool for PDFs

The Read tool cannot properly extract tabular data from PDFs. It will only show you a limited preview of the first page's text content, missing most of the data.

For PDF files, especially multi-page PDFs with tables:

• DO: Use pdfplumber as shown in this skill
• DO NOT: Use the Read tool to view PDF contents

If you need to extract data from a PDF, write Python code using pdfplumber. This is the only reliable way to get complete table data from all pages.

Overview

Extract text and tables from PDF documents using Python libraries.

Table Extraction with pdfplumber

pdfplumber is the recommended library for extracting tables from PDFs.

Basic Table Extraction

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            print(table)  # List of lists

Convert to pandas DataFrame

import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    page = pdf.pages[0]  # First page
    tables = page.extract_tables()

    if tables:
        # First row is usually headers
        table = tables[0]
        df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
        print(df)

Extract All Tables from Multi-Page PDF

import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd

all_tables = []

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            if table and len(table) > 1:  # Has data
                df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
                all_tables.append(df)

# Combine if same structure
if all_tables:
    combined = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True)

Text Extraction