PDF Exercise extractor

This tool is meant to make working with exercise pdfs easier. Often times as a student you will receive a pdf with exercises to work through - However the creators of the pdf did not put any space around the exercises, so working on these exercises on for example an iPad is a hassle.

This tool will take a pdf as input, recognise the exercises and then write a new pdf where each exercise is on a single page with some space around it. This will speed up your workflow and get you working on the exercises quickly.

The tool is command line based

Features

• automatically recognise exercises and put them on seperate pages with transparent background
• keep the "vector aspect" of the original aspect and that way have the same quality pdfs as the input source
• choose a template that you would like to. A good template can also be found in the repo (a4_dotted.pdf)
• works for every pdf document. What to split and put on a new pdf will be decided by the regex expression passed as an optional parameter the default pattern is [A-Za-z]+[0-9]+\.[0-9]+

Example

I have included one example file in the project with the corresponding out.pdf. The pdf was generated with the command: extract.py blatt-aufg.pdf a4_dotted.pdf

to get an understanding what the script does, first take a look at blatt-aufg.pdf and compare it to out.pdf and a4_dotted.pdf

Remarks

• It is recommended to keep the template.pdf with the same dimensions as the input.pdf
• You can use this for any exercise pdf, just provide a regex pattern to match the exercise names. You do not need to know regex - just use https://regex-generator.olafneumann.org/?
• if the spacing for the tasks is a bit off you can enter special spacing

help:

In case you do not remember the cli options, just type extract.py --help

Usage: extract.py [OPTIONS] INPUT_PDF TEMPLATE_PDF

Options:
  --out TEXT         location where the generated pdf should be put
  --format TEXT      regex to match the exercises. default will be suitable
                     for tasks in the format LETTER NUMBER DOT NUMBER
  --spacing INTEGER  add some spacing around the exercises. The deafult value
                     should work in most cases
  --help             Show this message and exit.