Pdf

Skill jafini/learn-claude-code/skills/pdf

Build a minimal Claude-style AI agent from scratch that processes messages, interacts with tools, and generates dynamic responses.

Install

npx -y skills add jafini/learn-claude-code --skill pdf

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

3 stars3 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Process PDF files - extract text, create PDFs, merge documents. Use when user asks to read PDF, create PDF, or work with PDF files.

SKILL.md

2.5 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

PDF Processing Skill

You now have expertise in PDF manipulation. Follow these workflows:

Reading PDFs

Option 1: Quick text extraction (preferred)

# Using pdftotext (poppler-utils)
pdftotext input.pdf -  # Output to stdout
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt  # Output to file

# If pdftotext not available, try:
python3 -c "
import fitz  # PyMuPDF
doc = fitz.open('input.pdf')
for page in doc:
    print(page.get_text())
"

Option 2: Page-by-page with metadata

import fitz  # pip install pymupdf

doc = fitz.open("input.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(doc)}")
print(f"Metadata: {doc.metadata}")

for i, page in enumerate(doc):
    text = page.get_text()
    print(f"--- Page {i+1} ---")
    print(text)

Creating PDFs

Option 1: From Markdown (recommended)

# Using pandoc
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

# With custom styling
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex -V geometry:margin=1in

Option 2: Programmatically

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello, PDF!")
c.save()

Option 3: From HTML

# Using wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf input.html output.pdf

# Or with Python
python3 -c "
import pdfkit
pdfkit.from_file('input.html', 'output.pdf')
"

Merging PDFs

import fitz

result = fitz.open()
for pdf_path in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", "file3.pdf"]:
    doc = fitz.open(pdf_path)
    result.insert_pdf(doc)
result.save("merged.pdf")

Splitting PDFs

import fitz

doc = fitz.open("input.pdf")
for i in range(len(doc)):
    single = fitz.open()
    single.insert_pdf(doc, from_page=i, to_page=i)
    single.save(f"page_{i+1}.pdf")

Key Libraries

Task	Library	Install
Read/Write/Merge	PyMuPDF	`pip install pymupdf`
Create from scratch	ReportLab	`pip install reportlab`
HTML to PDF	pdfkit	`pip install pdfkit` + wkhtmltopdf
Text extraction	pdftotext	`brew install poppler` / `apt install poppler-utils`

Best Practices

Always check if tools are installed before using them
Handle encoding issues - PDFs may contain various character encodings
Large PDFs: Process page by page to avoid memory issues
OCR for scanned PDFs: Use pytesseract if text extraction returns empty