pdf

name	pdf
description	Process PDF files - extract text, create PDFs, merge documents. Use when user asks to read PDF, create PDF, or work with PDF files.

PDF Processing Skill

You now have expertise in PDF manipulation. Follow these workflows:

Reading PDFs

Option 1: Quick text extraction (preferred)

# Using pdftotext (poppler-utils)
pdftotext input.pdf -  # Output to stdout
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt  # Output to file

# If pdftotext not available, try:
python3 -c "
import fitz  # PyMuPDF
doc = fitz.open('input.pdf')
for page in doc:
    print(page.get_text())
"

Option 2: Page-by-page with metadata

import fitz  # pip install pymupdf

doc = fitz.open("input.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(doc)}")
print(f"Metadata: {doc.metadata}")

for i, page in enumerate(doc):
    text = page.get_text()
    print(f"--- Page {i+1} ---")
    print(text)

Creating PDFs

Option 1: From Markdown (recommended)

# Using pandoc
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf

# With custom styling
pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex -V geometry:margin=1in

Option 2: Programmatically

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello, PDF!")
c.save()

Option 3: From HTML

# Using wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf input.html output.pdf

# Or with Python
python3 -c "
import pdfkit
pdfkit.from_file('input.html', 'output.pdf')
"

Merging PDFs

import fitz

result = fitz.open()
for pdf_path in ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", "file3.pdf"]:
    doc = fitz.open(pdf_path)
    result.insert_pdf(doc)
result.save("merged.pdf")

Splitting PDFs

import fitz

doc = fitz.open("input.pdf")
for i in range(len(doc)):
    single = fitz.open()
    single.insert_pdf(doc, from_page=i, to_page=i)
    single.save(f"page_{i+1}.pdf")

Key Libraries

Task	Library	Install
Read/Write/Merge	PyMuPDF	pip install pymupdf
Create from scratch	ReportLab	pip install reportlab
HTML to PDF	pdfkit	pip install pdfkit + wkhtmltopdf
Text extraction	pdftotext	brew install poppler / apt install poppler-utils

Best Practices

1. Always check if tools are installed before using them
2. Handle encoding issues - PDFs may contain various character encodings
3. Large PDFs: Process page by page to avoid memory issues
4. OCR for scanned PDFs: Use pytesseract if text extraction returns empty