PdfQRSplit

PdfQRSplit is a small utility to split a multi-page PDF document into separate PDF files based on pages containing a specified barcode. This concept is known as "separator page" and used in combination with high volume document scanners to scan a large number of unrelated documents in bulk.

While named "QR" this tool will also work with most other barcode types.

Installation and requirements

Python 3 or newer is required. You also need zxing (Barcode recognition), pypdf4 (PDF handling) and pillow (image handling) - all of them can be installed using pip:

pip install zxing pypdf4 pillow

or

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

usage: PdfQRSplit.py [-h] [-p PREFIX] [-s SEPARATOR] [-k] [--keep-page-next] [-b BRIGHTNESS] [-v] [-d] inputfile

Split PDF-file into separate files based on a separator barcode

positional arguments:
  inputfile             Filename or glob to process

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PREFIX, --prefix PREFIX
                        Prefix for generated PDF files. Default: split
  -s SEPARATOR, --separator SEPARATOR
                        Barcode content used to find separator pages. Default: ADAR-NEXTDOC
  -k, --keep-page       Keep separator page in previous document
  --keep-page-next      Keep separator page in next document
  -b BRIGHTNESS, --brightness BRIGHTNESS
                        brightness threshold for barcode preparation (0-255). Default: 128
  -v, --verbose         Show verbose processing messages
  -d, --debug           Show debug messages

Example

Take the file input.pdf, search all pages for barcodes containing the text "SPLITME". If found (or at the end of the input file) previously encountered pages will be written to a separate file, in this case (-k) including the page containing the separator barcode. Since no prefix was given the first file will be named "split_0_0.pdf". split is the default prefix, 0 indicates it was generated from the first (and in this case only) input file and the second 0 indicates it's the first document extracted from this file.

python .\test.py .\input.pdf -s "SPLITME" -k -v

Processing file .\input.pdf containing 66 pages
  Analyzing page 1
  Analyzing page 2
  [...]
  Analyzing page 6
    Found separator - writing 6 pages to split_0_0.pdf
  Analyzing page 7
  [...]
  Analyzing page 13
    Found separator - writing 7 pages to split_0_1.pdf
  Analyzing page 14
  [...]
Split 1 given files into 19 files

Thanks

This script is based on "pdf_split_tool" by Thiago Carvalho D'Ávila (staticdev).