Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

Chapter 13. Working with PDF and word Documents

PDF and Word documents are binary files, which makes them much more complex than plaintext files. In addition to text, they store lots of font, color, and layout information. If you want your programs to read or write to PDFs or Word documents, you’ll need to do more than simply pass their filenames to open().

Fortunately, there are Python modules that make it easy for you to interact with PDFs and Word documents. This chapter will cover two such modules: PyPDF2 and Python-Docx.

PDF Documents

PDF stands for Portable Document Format and uses the .pdf file extension. Although PDFs support many features, this chapter will focus on the two things you’ll be doing most often with them: reading text content ...