PDF reading, creation, and review guidance

Reading PDFs

• Use pdftoppm -png $OUTDIR/$BASENAME.pdf $OUTDIR/$BASENAME to convert PDFs to PNGs.
• Then open the PNGs and read the images.
• pdfplumber is also installed and can be used to read PDFs. It can be used as a complementary tool to pdftoppm but not replacing it.
• Only do python printing as a last resort because you will miss important details with text extraction (e.g. figures, tables, diagrams).

Primary tooling for creating PDFs

• Generate PDFs programmatically with reportlab as the primary tool. In most cases, you should use reportlab to create PDFs.
• If there are other packages you think are necessary for the task (eg. pypdf, pyMuPDF), you can use them but you may need topip install them first.
• After each meaningful update—content additions, layout adjustments, or style changes—render the PDF to images to check layout fidelity:
  • pdftoppm -png $INPUT_PDF $OUTPUT_PREFIX
• Inspect every exported PNG before continuing work. If anything looks off, fix the source and re-run the render → inspect loop until the pages are clean.