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:
npx tsx -e "import { readFile } from 'node:fs/promises'; import pdf from 'pdf-parse'; const data = await pdf(await readFile('input.pdf')); console.log(data.text);"

Option 2: Page-by-page with metadata

import { readFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import pdf from "pdf-parse";

const data = await pdf(await readFile("input.pdf"));
console.log(`Pages: ${data.numpages}`);
console.log(`Metadata: ${JSON.stringify(data.info)}`);
console.log(data.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

import { writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { PDFDocument, StandardFonts } from "pdf-lib";

const doc = await PDFDocument.create();
const page = doc.addPage([612, 792]);
const font = await doc.embedFont(StandardFonts.Helvetica);
page.drawText("Hello, PDF!", { x: 100, y: 750, size: 12, font });
await writeFile("output.pdf", await doc.save());

Option 3: From HTML

# Using wkhtmltopdf
wkhtmltopdf input.html output.pdf

# Or with Playwright
npx playwright pdf input.html output.pdf

Merging PDFs

import { readFile, writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { PDFDocument } from "pdf-lib";

const merged = await PDFDocument.create();
for (const path of ["file1.pdf", "file2.pdf", "file3.pdf"]) {
  const source = await PDFDocument.load(await readFile(path));
  const pages = await merged.copyPages(source, source.getPageIndices());
  pages.forEach((page) => merged.addPage(page));
}
await writeFile("merged.pdf", await merged.save());

Splitting PDFs

import { readFile, writeFile } from "node:fs/promises";
import { PDFDocument } from "pdf-lib";

const source = await PDFDocument.load(await readFile("input.pdf"));
for (const index of source.getPageIndices()) {
  const single = await PDFDocument.create();
  const [page] = await single.copyPages(source, [index]);
  single.addPage(page);
  await writeFile(`page_${index + 1}.pdf`, await single.save());
}

Key Libraries

Task	Library	Install
Read text	pdf-parse	npm install pdf-parse
Read/Write/Merge	pdf-lib	npm install pdf-lib
HTML to PDF	Playwright or wkhtmltopdf	npm install playwright / brew install 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 ocrmypdf or tesseract if text extraction returns empty