pdf-processing

name	pdf-processing
description	Extract text and tables from PDF files, fill PDF forms, merge and split documents. Use when the user mentions PDFs, forms, document extraction, or needs to combine multiple PDF files.
license	Apache-2.0
metadata	{"author":"example-org","version":"1.0"}

PDF Processing Skill

Overview

This skill enables working with PDF documents: extracting text, filling forms, merging files, and splitting pages.

When to Use

Activate this skill when the user:

• Asks to read, extract, or summarize content from a PDF
• Needs to fill in a PDF form programmatically
• Wants to merge multiple PDFs into one document
• Needs to split a PDF into individual pages

Step 1: Identify the Task

Determine which operation is needed:

Task	Tool
Extract text	pdfplumber
Fill forms	pypdf
Merge files	pypdf
Split pages	pypdf

Step 2: Install Dependencies

pip install pdfplumber pypdf

Step 3: Extract Text

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        text = page.extract_text()
        print(text)

Step 4: Merge PDFs

from pypdf import PdfWriter

writer = PdfWriter()
for filename in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf"]:
    writer.append(filename)

with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)

Edge Cases

• Password-protected PDFs require the password to be passed to the reader
• Scanned PDFs (image-based) require OCR — use pytesseract with pdf2image
• Very large PDFs should be processed page-by-page to avoid memory issues

Notes

Always close file handles after processing. Use context managers (with statements) wherever possible.