Readable pdf

Skill yamadashy/agent-readable/skills/readable-pdf

Agent Skills for reading hard-to-access content

Install

npx -y skills add yamadashy/agent-readable --skill readable-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

2 stars2 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

Extracts text (with original line breaks), metadata, per-page character / image density, and optional rendered PNGs from a PDF using pdfvision. Falls back to --render on pages whose density Overview shows low text coverage so multimodal models can read raster slides. Use when the URL ends in .pdf, the user supplies a local PDF path, or another readable-* skill produced a PDF that still needs structured extraction.

SKILL.md

2.3 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

PDF Reader

Uses pdfvision for cross-agent PDF extraction. pdfvision returns text with line breaks preserved, document metadata, per-page density, and optional rendered PNGs for multimodal models.

Prerequisite

npx pdfvision --version

Or install globally: npm install -g pdfvision. Requires Node.js >= 22.13.

Run npx pdfvision --help once before invoking — the flag set evolves (page selection, render output dir, layout / geometry / image-boxes opt-ins, etc.) and the help text is the source of truth for what the installed version supports.

Steps

1. Get a local PDF path

If the input is a URL, download first:

curl -L -o /tmp/doc.pdf "{URL}"

If the input is already a local path, skip this step.

2. Extract text + metadata

npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf

Default output is markdown with one ## Page N section per page and a density Overview at the top.

3. Switch format when needed

# Structured JSON for downstream programmatic use
npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf -f json

# Tag-shaped XML, easier for some LLMs to parse than JSON
npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf -f xml

4. Render pages for multimodal review

If the Overview shows low character coverage on a page (i.e. the page is largely an image / scan), render PNGs and read them:

npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf --render -p {pages}

The output reports the PNG paths. Read each image with the agent's image-reading capability.

5. Page subsets

npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf -p 1-5
npx pdfvision /tmp/doc.pdf -p 1,3,5

Why pdfvision over a built-in PDF reader

Works in any agent runtime that can spawn a CLI, not only Claude Code.
Reports per-page density so the agent can detect rasterised pages and re-extract with --render.
Caches by content hash, so repeated reads of the same PDF are instant.