pdfSplit.py

This script will split a PDF into a number of pages per output file, but only split on a page that contains a string that indicates the start of a new segment.

Instructions

Deploy Script and Pre-requisites

Navigate to Python’s download page and download then install any version in the version 3 stream of python.

Install Python 3 on the server where this script will be executed.

Download the pdfSplit.py script file, and put it in a scripts folder on the customer’s machine.

pdfSplit.py 5 KB Navigate to the scripts folder and run the following command to install the PDF component for python:

pip install PyPDF4

Execute script

Get Help

The script can be executed in the following manner to display help information:

py pdfSplit.py /?

Look up page contents

The script can be executed in the following manner in order to see the content of a specific page for a specified PDF. This should be used to figure out a search string that indicates the first page of each segment of the PDF.

py pdfSplit.py /d <path to PDF file> <page number>

For example:

py .\pdfSplit.py /d "c:/users/username/desktop/pdf/sample/NotAlwaysMultipageBill.pdf" 2

Split PDF

The script can be executed in the following manner:

py pdfSplit.py <path to folder> <path to archive folder> <path to output> <string to be present on first page of bill> <ideal chunk size>

For example:

py pdfSplit.py "C:/Users/username/Desktop/pdf" "C:/Users/username/Desktop/pdf/archive" "C:/Users/username/Desktop/pdf/output" CustomerAccountNumber "2"

The following pseudocode describes the script’s functionality:

FOR EACH pdf in <path to folder>
  CALCULATE where breaks in the pdf should be.
  FOR EACH break in the pdf
    WRITE new pdf with pages between last break and next break to <output folder>
  MOVE pdf to <archive folder>

This script assumes there is a search string that will be repeated only in the first page of each new bill. This is a requirement so that we can detect a the page that starts a new bill and no bills are cut in half to be displayed in another customers' bill.

Unit tests

All aspects of the pdfTools.py, which is leveraged by pdfSplit.py has unit tests in the file pdfTools_test.py. You can run all unit tests with the following command in a folder alongside the code:

py -m unittest pdfTools_test