pdf

name	pdf
description	Read/extract/combine/split PDFs.

pdf

Common PDF ops without bringing in a heavyweight Node dependency. Use the OS-bundled tools (macOS) or pdftk (Linux) via Bash.

When to invoke

• User says "extract page X", "merge these PDFs", "summarize this PDF", "remove page Y from foo.pdf".

Tools

| Op | macOS | Linux (pdftk) | | ----------------- | ----------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------- | ---- | | Extract pages 2-5 | cpdf in.pdf 2-5 -o out.pdf (needs cpdf) | pdftk in.pdf cat 2-5 output out.pdf | | Merge a, b, c | (PDF Toolkit / cpdf) | pdftk a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf cat output merged.pdf | | Split per page | cpdf -split in.pdf -o page-%d.pdf | pdftk in.pdf burst output page-%02d.pdf | | Text dump | pdftotext in.pdf - (needs poppler) | same | | Page count | pdftk in.pdf dump_data | grep NumberOfPages | same |

If neither cpdf nor pdftk is installed, use Python + pypdf (one dep, pure Python):

python3 -c "
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
r = PdfReader('in.pdf')
w = PdfWriter()
for p in r.pages[1:5]:  # pages 2-5 (0-indexed)
    w.add_page(p)
w.write(open('out.pdf', 'wb'))
"

Reading content for the agent

For summarization, extract text first, then feed it to the model. Use pdftotext in.pdf - (poppler) which writes to stdout — easy to capture in Bash output.

If the PDF is scanned (image-only), text extraction returns empty/garbage. Tell the user: "this PDF is scanned; you'd need OCR via tesseract first" rather than producing nonsense.

Anti-patterns

• Don't write a full Node PDF parser inline — use the CLI tool.
• Don't try to OCR scanned PDFs without explicitly opting in (slow + needs the language pack).