readpdf

name	readpdf
description	Extract embedded text and rendered page images from PDFs. Use when the user asks to read, inspect, parse, convert, or extract contents from PDF files without OCR.

Read PDF

Use the bundled readpdf.sh script to extract embedded text from PDFs with pdftotext and render each page as a JPEG with pdftoppm.

This skill does not OCR scanned PDFs. It only extracts text already present in the PDF, plus page images for visual inspection.

Commands

Extract to a chosen directory

./readpdf.sh extract -o <output-dir> <pdf-or-dir>...

Inputs may be PDF files or directories. Directories are searched recursively for *.pdf files.

For each PDF, the script writes:

• <output-dir>/XXX.txt — embedded text extracted with pdftotext -layout
• <output-dir>/XXX.N.jpg — rendered page N, at 200 DPI

The script emits every generated file path to stdout.

Read PDFs into model context

./readpdf.sh read <pdf-or-dir>...

This extracts to a temporary directory, emits all generated paths to stdout, and prints a reminder on stderr.

When using read, after running the script you must read the generated .txt files and inspect/read every .jpg page image into context. Prefer reading .txt first, then the images in page order, so both embedded text and visual layout are available.

Notes

• Requires Poppler tools on PATH: pdftotext and pdftoppm.
• Poppler is installed by Homebrew as poppler in install.bash.
• If a PDF contains only scanned images, the .txt file may be empty; still inspect the rendered page images.
• If multiple PDFs have the same basename, later outputs get numeric suffixes to avoid overwriting.