pdf

argument-hint	[file ...]
compatibility	Requires macOS, uv, Poppler, qpdf, Ghostscript, OCRmyPDF with Tesseract language data, and img2pdf.
disable-model-invocation	false
name	pdf
user-invocable	true
description	Use when PDF files are the primary input or output: read, compare, reconcile, extract text/tables/images, OCR scans, fill forms, split, merge, rotate, rename, compress, or convert between PDF and images. Optimized for private financial, tax, legal, and health documents on macOS.

PDF

Process PDFs locally on macOS with exact extraction, source preservation, deliberate tool routing, and structural plus semantic validation.

Invariants

1. Keep document contents local unless the user explicitly authorizes an upload or external disclosure. Package and language-data downloads do not authorize document disclosure.
2. Preserve every original PDF byte-for-byte. Write a sibling output, copy, or explicitly named destination unless the user authorizes destructive replacement.
3. Preserve monetary values, identifiers, dates, signs, and displayed precision as strings. Use decimal.Decimal for arithmetic; never infer missing rows or silently discard headers, footnotes, continuation lines, or boundary pages.
4. Inspect structure and representative renders before choosing a transformation. Use the smallest tool that preserves the required layout, forms, annotations, and image quality.
5. Validate every written PDF structurally and against task semantics. A command exiting successfully is not evidence that extracted rows, totals, page boundaries, form appearances, or visual layout are correct.
6. Keep reports concise for private financial, tax, legal, and health documents. Prefer counts, reconciliations, and file references over raw sensitive rows unless the rows materially support the task or the user asks for them.

Profile First

Resolve the skill directory from this SKILL.md, then profile every unknown input:

uv run "<skill-dir>/scripts/profile.py" "<input.pdf>"

The helper emits schema-versioned JSON with integrity, encryption, page geometry/rotation, image counts, and per-page text coverage without document text. Stop on password_required; password handling is outside this skill.

Render representative pages whenever layout, cropping, OCR quality, signatures, or form placement matters. Include the first and last page, every structural boundary, and any page behind a discrepancy.

Route by Evidence

Need	Preferred route
Quick reading or page-aware extraction	Host PDF reader when available, then pdftotext -layout
Coordinates, columns, or difficult tables	Poppler bounding boxes, then pdfplumber through uv run
Image-only or materially incomplete text	OCRmyPDF with Tesseract; default languages eng+ron
Merge, split, rotate, or integrity checks	qpdf
Render pages or extract embedded images	pdftocairo or pdfimages
Convert ordered images into a PDF	img2pdf
Reduce size	qpdf lossless rewrite first; Ghostscript only for an accepted lossy pass
Inspect, fill, flatten, or overlay forms	Read references/forms.md first

Read references/recipes.md only when exact commands for the selected extraction, transformation, OCR, image, comparison, or compression branch are needed.

Execute and Reconcile

1. Profile inputs and identify whether each page is digital, scanned, mixed, rotated, or image-heavy.
2. Extract or transform into a new path. For tabular documents, retain page provenance and parse continuations across page breaks before assigning rows.
3. Reconcile financial and evidentiary output with every available invariant: page and row counts, opening/closing balances, inflows/outflows, subtotals, displayed totals, date coverage, and source hashes when provenance matters.
4. For comparisons, extract both sources independently, enumerate overlapping and unique facts, and render the pages behind every material disagreement. Distinguish a real discrepancy from an extraction failure.
5. For split or rename work, establish an old-to-new map from stable content identifiers. Copy by default, preserve contextual boundary pages when needed, and verify the first and last page of every result.
6. Validate outputs with qpdf, expected page count/dimensions, text coverage, representative renders, and the task's semantic invariants. Retain OCR sidecars or extraction intermediates only when they are requested or useful evidence.

Completion requires preserved originals, intentional outputs, successful structural checks, semantic reconciliation, and a concise report of paths and evidence. Lead read-only reports with ### 📄 PDF — 🔎 inspected, no files written; use ### 📄 PDF — ✅ updated only after all required validation passes, and ### 📄 PDF — ⛔ not deliverable when a required check fails.