pdf

name	pdf
description	Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms. When Claude needs to fill in a PDF form or programmatically process, generate, or analyze PDF documents at scale.
license	Proprietary. LICENSE.txt has complete terms

PDF Toolkit

Use this skill for PDF extraction, generation, splitting/merging, annotation, form filling, visual conversion, and batch processing.

Choose Path

• Text extraction: try pdftotext or pypdf; use pdfplumber for layout and tables.
• Merge/split/rotate/encrypt: use qpdf or pypdf.
• Create PDFs: use reportlab; read reference.md for advanced layout.
• Fill forms: read forms.md first and use bundled scripts.
• Visual analysis: convert pages to images with scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py or Poppler tools.
• Scanned PDFs: OCR with pytesseract after image conversion.

Bundled References

Open only when needed:

• forms.md: required for fillable forms and annotation workflow.
• reference.md: advanced pypdfium2, pdf-lib, layout, and troubleshooting.

Bundled Scripts

Prefer scripts as black boxes; run --help first:

• check_fillable_fields.py
• extract_form_field_info.py
• fill_fillable_fields.py
• fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py
• check_bounding_boxes.py
• create_validation_image.py
• convert_pdf_to_images.py

Core Patterns

Minimal text extraction:

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
text = "\n".join(page.extract_text() or "" for page in reader.pages)

Minimal merge:

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

writer = PdfWriter()
for path in ["a.pdf", "b.pdf"]:
    for page in PdfReader(path).pages:
        writer.add_page(page)
with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as f:
    writer.write(f)

Verification

Always verify produced PDFs. For structural operations, reopen with pypdf and check page count/metadata. For forms or annotations, create validation images and inspect visible placement.