I’m not a software developer, but I like to use Python to help speed up some of my office work. One of my regular tasks is to print a stack of ~40 sheets of paper, highlight key information for each entry (about 3 entries per page), and fill out a spreadsheet with that information that then gets loaded into our software.

This is time-consuming, and I’d like to write a program that can scan the OCR-ed PDFs and pull the relevant information into a CSV.

I’m confident I could handle it from there, but I know that PDFs are tricky files to work with. Are there any Python modules that might be a good fit for the approach I’m hoping to take here? Thanks!

  • charolastra@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    pypdf, recently been updated to version 3… it sometimes takes a bit of wrangling for more specific use cases: I’ve used it in conjunction with reportlab when needing to add text and other bits with a bit more flexibility.

    • milkisklim
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      6 months ago

      From what I understand PyPDF3 and 4 are separate from pypdf which is the modern version of PyPDF2 as of last year

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      • charolastra@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        That’s correct afaik. The maintainers of PyPDF2 merged it back into the original pypdf for version 3 I believe.