What is PDFlex?

PDFlex is a powerful PDF processing toolkit for Python. It provides robust tools for PDF validation, text extraction, merging (with custom separator pages), searching, and more—all built to streamline your PDF automation workflows.

Features

• PDF Validation: Quickly verify if a file is a valid PDF.
• Text Extraction: Extract text from PDFs using either PyMuPDF or PyPDF.
• Directory Processing: Process entire directories of PDFs for text extraction.
• PDF Merging: Merge multiple PDF files into one, automatically inserting a custom separator page between documents.
  • The separator page displays the title (derived from the filename) with underscores and hyphens removed.
  • Supports both portrait and landscape separator pages (ideal for lecture slides).
• PDF Searching: Recursively search for PDFs in a directory based on filename patterns (e.g., numeric float prefixes).

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Quick Start

Installation

PDFlex is available on PyPI. To install using pip:

pip install -U pdflex

Alternatively, install in an isolated environment with pipx:

pipx install pdflex

For the fastest installation using uv:

uv tool install pdflex

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Usage

Command-Line Interface (CLI)

PDFlex provides a convenient CLI for merging and searching PDFs. The CLI supports two primary commands: merge and search.

Merge Command

Merge multiple PDF files into a single document while automatically inserting a separator page before each document.

Usage:

pdflex merge /path/to/file1.pdf /path/to/file2.pdf -o merged_output.pdf

Add the --landscape flag to create separator pages in landscape orientation:

pdflex merge /path/to/file1.pdf /path/to/file2.pdf -o merged_output.pdf --landscape

Search and Merge Command

Search for PDF files in a directory based on filename filters (or search for lecture slides with numeric float prefixes) and merge them into one PDF.

Usage:

• General Search:

  pdflex search /path/to/search -o merged_output.pdf --prefix "Chapter" --suffix ".pdf"

• Lecture Slides Merge: (Merges all PDFs whose filenames start with a numeric float prefix like 1.2_, 3.2_, etc., in sorted order. Separator pages will be in landscape orientation.)

  pdflex search /path/to/algorithms-and-computation -o merged_lectures.pdf --lecture

Python API Usage

You can also use PDFlex directly from your Python code. Below are examples for some common tasks.

Merging PDFs with Separator Pages

from pathlib import Path
from pdflex.merge import merge_pdfs

# List of PDF file paths to merge
pdf_files = [
    "/path/to/document1.pdf",
    "/path/to/document2.pdf"
]

# Merge files, using landscape separator pages (ideal for lecture slides)
merge_pdfs(pdf_files, output_path="merged_output.pdf", landscape=True)

Searching for PDFs by Filename

from pdflex.search import search_pdfs, search_numeric_prefixed_pdfs

# General search: Find PDFs that start with a prefix and/or end with a suffix
pdf_list = search_pdfs("/path/to/search", prefix="Chapter", suffix=".pdf")
print("Found PDFs:", pdf_list)

# Lecture slides: Find PDFs with numeric float prefixes (e.g., "1.2_Intro.pdf")
lecture_slides = search_numeric_prefixed_pdfs("/path/to/algorithms-and-computation")
print("Found lecture slides:", lecture_slides)

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Whether it's bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions, please feel free to:

1. Open an issue
2. Submit a pull request
3. Improve documentation.
4. Share your ideas!

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Acknowledgments

This project is built upon several awesome PDF open-source projects:

• pypdf
• pdfplumber
• reportlab

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License

PDFlex is released under the MIT license.
Copyright (c) 2020 to present PDFlex and contributors.