readable-pdf

# PDF Reader Uses [pdfvision](https://github.com/yamadashy/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 ```bash 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: ```bash curl -L -o /tmp/doc.pdf "{URL}" ``` If the input is already a local path, skip this step. ### 2. Extract text + metadata ```bash 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 ```bash # 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: ```bash 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 ```bash 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.