nano-pdf

name	nano-pdf
description	Lightweight PDF text extraction and page manipulation
emoji	📑
version	1.0.0
requires	{"bins":["pdftotext"],"anyBins":["pdftk","qpdf"]}
invocation	{"userInvocable":true}

Nano PDF (PDF Text Extraction & Utilities)

Lightweight PDF processing focused on fast text extraction and basic page manipulation. Unlike the pdf-editor skill which handles full PDF editing, this skill is optimized for quick read-only operations: pulling text out of PDFs, inspecting metadata, and simple split/merge tasks.

Usage

• "Extract the text from report.pdf"
• "Get text from pages 5 through 10 of the manual"
• "How many pages is this PDF?"
• "Show me the metadata for this document"
• "Split this PDF into one file per page"
• "Merge these three PDFs into one"
• "Convert page 3 of the PDF to an image"

How it works

Uses pdftotext (from poppler-utils) for text extraction and pdftk or qpdf for page manipulation.

Text extraction

• All pages: pdftotext input.pdf - (outputs to stdout)
• Specific pages: pdftotext -f 5 -l 10 input.pdf - (pages 5-10)
• Layout-preserving: pdftotext -layout input.pdf -
• Raw text (no layout): pdftotext -raw input.pdf -

Metadata

• Via pdftotext's companion: pdfinfo input.pdf (page count, title, author, creation date)

Split and merge (pdftk)

• Split all pages: pdftk input.pdf burst output page_%02d.pdf
• Extract page range: pdftk input.pdf cat 1-5 output first5.pdf
• Merge files: pdftk a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf cat output merged.pdf

Split and merge (qpdf)

• Extract pages: qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- output.pdf
• Merge files: qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf -- merged.pdf

Convert to image

• Using pdftoppm (poppler): pdftoppm -png -f 3 -l 3 input.pdf page3 (produces page3-3.png)

Setup

Install poppler-utils (provides pdftotext, pdfinfo, pdftoppm) and one of pdftk or qpdf:

macOS

brew install poppler
brew install pdftk-java   # or: brew install qpdf

Linux

sudo apt install poppler-utils
sudo apt install pdftk   # or: sudo apt install qpdf