Processing Pdfs

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.