Is slate dead? What is an alternative?

[MartinThoma]

Hi Tim, as the last commit was in 2017, I assume slate is dead. Maybe you can set the development status to Development Status :: 7 - Inactive?

Which libraries would you recommend for reading PDF files?

[zoldaten]

Why dead ?
Everything works.
Just try this way:
with open('example.pdf','rb') as f:
doc = slate.PDF(f)

If you have error with import utils - just install it -
pip install utils

[MartinThoma]

Dead in the sense that no development / maintenance happens. The fact that it took a year to get an answer speaks for itself.

[gabema]

A lot of this would be fixed by PR #53

[MartinThoma]

In the meantime I became the maintainer of PyPDF2. I can recommend to use PyPDF2 as we cover many use cases, have a large user base and some very active contributors