PDF reading, creation, and review guidance

Reading PDFs

• Use pdftoppm -png $OUTDIR/$BASENAME.pdf $OUTDIR/$BASENAME to convert PDFs to PNGs.
• Then open the PNGs and read the images.
• pdfplumber is also installed and can be used to read PDFs. It can be used as a complementary tool to pdftoppm but not replacing it.
• Only do python printing as a last resort because you will miss important details with text extraction (e.g. figures, tables, diagrams).

Primary tooling for creating PDFs

• Generate PDFs programmatically with reportlab as the primary tool. In most cases, you should use reportlab to create PDFs.
• If there are other packages you think are necessary for the task (eg. pypdf, pyMuPDF), you can use them but you may need topip install them first.
• After each meaningful update—content additions, layout adjustments, or style changes—render the PDF to images to check layout fidelity:
  • pdftoppm -png $INPUT_PDF $OUTPUT_PREFIX
• Inspect every exported PNG before continuing work. If anything looks off, fix the source and re-run the render → inspect loop until the pages are clean.

Quality expectations

• Maintain a polished, intentional visual design: consistent typography, spacing, margins, color palette, and clear section breaks across all pages.
• Avoid major rendering issues—no clipped text, overlapping elements, black squares, broken tables, or unreadable glyphs. The rendered pages should look like a curated document, not raw template output.
• Charts, tables, diagrams, and images must be sharp, well-aligned, and properly labeled in the PNGs. Legends and axes should be readable without excessive zoom.
• Text must be readable at normal viewing size; avoid walls of filler text or dense, unstructured bullet lists. Use whitespace to separate ideas.
• Never use the U+2011 non-breaking hyphen or other unicode dashes as they will not be rendered correctly. Use ASCII hyphens instead.
• Citations, references, and footnotes must be human-readable and professional. No tool-internal tokens (e.g., [145036110387964†L158-L160]), malformed URLs, or placeholder text should be present in the document.
• You must convert all citations into a human-readable format in the document with standard scholarly citation format. No 【【turn1541736113682297662view0†L11-L19】 notations are allowed in the document as the reader cannot interpret them (such citations will be severely penalized).
• Correct every formatting defect you see in the PNGs, including but not limited to: overlapping text or shapes, clipped text or shapes that are cut off, black squares, broken tables, unreadable characters, etc.

Final checks

• Do not ship the PDF until the latest PNG inspection shows zero visual or formatting defects. Confirm page numbering, headers/footers, and section transitions look polished.
• You must resolve any issues you spot (typos, spacing, alignment, color contrast) and re-render for a final verification pass before submitting.
• Keep intermediate PNGs/PDFs clearly labeled or cleaned up so reviewers can navigate the outputs easily.