PyPDF2 (forked from pyPdf) is wonderful. I use it a fair bit in my job, mainly for chopping up PDFs and re-assembling the pages in a different order. It does sometimes have difficulty with non-standard PDFs though that seem fine in other programs. This can be frustrating.

The one that I’ve been battling with today from some PDFs provided by a client was:

PyPDF2.utils.PdfReadError: EOF marker not found

I managed to find a workaround using PDFtk to fix the PDF in memory at the first sign of any trouble. It works well so far, so in case anyone else is having similar issues I thought I’d write it up.

Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base. It has bindings for Qt4 which we can use through Python/PyQt. Using these libraries under most popular Linux distributions is as simple as installing the Poppler package, but under Windows I’ve found that things are a little more tricky to get working.