You fed a stack of mail into the sheet scanner. Out came scan.pdf: an invoice, a lab report, and a city notice, all stapled into one 6-page file. Your archive wants three files with real names. unstaple reads the text layer, finds where one document ends and the next begins, and writes each one out separately.

$ unstaple scan.pdf
scan.pdf: 6 pages, 3 documents detected

proposed cuts:
  cut before page 3   confidence 0.95  [page numbering reset: "Page 1 of 3" after "Page 2 of 2"; header shift (similarity 0.00)]
  cut before page 6   confidence 0.96  [page numbering reset: "Page 1 of 1" after "Page 3 of 3"; header shift (similarity 0.00); date change (2026-04-17 -> 2026-05-02)]

documents:
  pages 1-2    -> 2026-03-03-acme-supply-co-invoice-4821.pdf
  pages 3-5    -> 2026-04-17-northwind-medical-group-lab-results-summary.pdf
  page 6       -> 2026-05-02-city-of-springfield.pdf

wrote unstapled/2026-03-03-acme-supply-co-invoice-4821.pdf
wrote unstapled/2026-04-17-northwind-medical-group-lab-results-summary.pdf
wrote unstapled/2026-05-02-city-of-springfield.pdf

That transcript is real: it is the output of unstaple on the synthetic fixture in tests/fixtures/, and the test suite asserts those exact boundaries and names.

Install

pip install unstaple

Or, for a clean isolated install of the CLI:

pipx install unstaple

Requires Python 3.10 or newer. The only runtime dependency is pypdf.

Usage

unstaple scan.pdf              # split into ./unstapled/
unstaple scan.pdf --dry-run    # show proposed cuts and names, write nothing
unstaple scan.pdf -o outbox    # choose the output directory
unstaple scan.pdf --threshold 0.7   # demand more confidence before cutting

Always start with --dry-run. It prints every proposed cut with a confidence score and the evidence behind it, so you can sanity-check the plan before any files are written. If a boundary is missed, lower --threshold; if it cuts too eagerly, raise it.

unstaple is lossless: every input page lands in exactly one output file, in order. Blank pages (separator sheets, blank duplex backs) stay attached to the document before them.

How boundary scoring works

For every page, unstaple extracts deterministic signals from the text layer. No ML, no network, no cloud: the same input always produces the same cuts, and every cut comes with its reasons.

For each pair of adjacent pages it asks: does the second page start a new document?

Evidence for a cut (combined with a noisy-OR, so any strong signal can carry the decision):

Evidence against a cut (multiplies the score down):

A cut is proposed when the final score clears --threshold (default 0.5). One deliberate asymmetry: a hard numbering reset overrides header continuity and shared dates, because three invoices from the same vendor share a letterhead but are still three documents.

Names are inferred from the first page of each split: the first date found (ISO format) plus the first prominent line (usually the letterhead), plus a following all-caps title line if there is one. Collisions get -2, -3 suffixes; if nothing usable is found, you get document-01.pdf.

Honest scope

v0.1 is deliberately narrow. Know what you are getting:

• Text-layer PDFs only. If pypdf cannot extract text, unstaple refuses and tells you so. Image-only scans need OCR first (run them through OCRmyPDF); native OCR support is on the roadmap.
• Heuristics, not magic. Documents with no page numbers, no dates, and an identical or absent header will not be separated. Two-page memos that look alike may be merged. --dry-run exists precisely so you can check before committing.
• English-leaning patterns. "Page X of Y" and English month names are recognized; other languages are roadmap material (and easy contributions, see below).
• One PDF in, N PDFs out. No watch folders, no GUI, no daemon. It is a small sharp tool meant to sit in a pipeline before your archive tool ingests the results.

Why this exists

Every paperless workflow hits this problem: the scanner ADF happily eats a month of mail and hands you one giant PDF. The paperless-ngx issue tracker has years of requests for automatic document separation, and the usual answers are barcode separator sheets (which require planning ahead), cloud SaaS splitters (your mail, someone else's server), or GUI page-range pickers (you do the boundary detection yourself, with a mouse). unstaple is the missing fourth option: a local, deterministic, scriptable splitter that explains its decisions and never sends a byte anywhere.

Development

git clone https://github.com/BenMalaga/unstaple
cd unstaple
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

The test fixtures are synthetic stapled PDFs generated by tests/fixtures/make_fixtures.py (reportlab, dev dependency only). The end-to-end tests split them and assert exact boundaries and filenames.

Roadmap

• OCR fallback for image-only scans (probably via optional OCRmyPDF integration)
• Non-English page-number and date patterns
• Font-size and layout signals from the PDF content stream (a big bold first line is a strong title hint)
• --interactive mode to accept, reject, or move proposed cuts

Contributing

The single most valuable contribution is a real-world PDF that unstaple gets wrong, anonymized, with a note about where the cuts should have been. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Ben Malaga.