Course Overview

About

Whether you are seeking to delve into PDF management using the Python programming language or you just need a quick brush-up, this course is what you are searching for!

This course has been designed to deliver a broad introduction to the emerging Python libraries that have been conceived to streamline PDF management.

This course is intended for Python developers with intermediate or expert experience who want to take a leap towards automating the boring tasks associated with PDF handling.

Python is a high-level, object-oriented, interpreted language with relatively easy syntax. Python comes with a collection of extensive and well-integrated libraries, which provide the ultimate solution to handle unstructured data sources like PDF.

By the end of this course, you will have a good grasp of the tools needed for manipulating PDF documents, with experience not only on foundational theories and underlying concepts, but also on practical applications and implementations. In fact, instead of merely explaining the basis and the theories, we help you to build a solid coding framework for managing PDF documents using Python, with a focus on hands-on implementation and real-world scenarios through a series of dedicated lab sessions.

What will you learn?

This course is divided into five modules covering various areas, going down from general concepts to practical applications. It is designed to be completed within four to five weeks. Here is a brief overview of what you can expect:

• The first chapter is primarily focused on the story and the structure of the Portable Document File format, and it will walk you through the chief Python libraries dedicated to PDF management.

• An advanced coverage of the core PDF management functions will take place in the second chapter, and factor in PDF metadata management, PDF creation, among other things.

• The third chapter concentrates on PDF pages processing functions, which embodies several functions like splitting, rotating, removing, shuffling, dynamically watermarking, and converting to images.

• The fourth chapter takes an in-depth look at a broad spectrum of content processing functionalities. These range from extracting tabular data, images or hyperlinks, to annotating or redacting text, to parsing the text content of a PDF document.

• The last chapter sheds light on general-purpose functions applied to PDF documents processing, like merging, converting to other types, securing, cracking, comparing, computing checksum, and dealing with scanned PDF documents.

Every chapter includes a small, vetted, quiz that has been designed to assess the level of your understanding of the material interpreted, to test your knowledge retention, and to reinforce the elaborated key information.

Expected outcomes

The goal of this course is to solidify the demonstrated concepts through examples. The course will also equip you with enough hands-on programming experience to start developing tools and utilities for manipulating PDF documents that are tailored to your needs.