Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to TheSethRose/Copilot-Skills. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheSethRose/Copilot-Skills/main/.github/instructions/pdf-handling.instructions.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TheSethRose/Copilot-SkillsWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/thesethrose/copilot-skills/pdf-handling)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/thesethrose/copilot-skills/pdf-handling"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/thesethrose/copilot-skills/pdf-handling.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>What it costs to keep this loaded
Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00961 | $0.00961 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00481 | $0.00481 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00192 | $0.00192 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00096 | $0.00096 |
Grade A, and why
Copilot-Skills pdf-handling.instructions.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 8d ago.
A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.
Nothing flagged
None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 121 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
PDF Handling - Automatic Context Instructions
Related Prompt: /pdf-handling
Related Skill: .github/copilot-skills/pdf-handling/SKILL.md
Triggers: PDF, pdf, report, export, document, form, fillable, extract text, merge pdf, split pdf, watermark, table extraction
Context: PDF Document Operations
When working with files matching the patterns above, or when user queries contain PDF-related keywords, this context is automatically activated.
Preferred Libraries
Python (Recommended)
pypdf(formerly PyPDF2) - Reading, merging, splitting PDFspdfplumber- Text and table extraction with high accuracyreportlab- PDF generation and creationpdfrw- Form field manipulation and filling
Command Line Tools
qpdf- PDF transformation and repairpdftotext- Fast text extractionpdftk(legacy) - PDF manipulation toolkit
Default Behaviors
When user mentions "PDF" or "extract"
- Suggest
/pdf-handlingskill prompt - Check if required libraries are installed
- Prefer
pdfplumberfor text extraction (better accuracy than pypdf) - Handle password-protected PDFs with appropriate warnings
When user mentions "form" or "fillable"
- Suggest
/pdf-handlingskill prompt - Load
.github/copilot-skills/pdf-handling/forms.mdfor detailed form handling - Prefer
pdfrwfor form field operations - Warn about XFA forms (not supported by most Python libraries)
When user mentions "create" or "generate"
- Suggest
/pdf-handlingskill prompt - Use
reportlabfor programmatic PDF creation - Consider HTML → PDF conversion for complex layouts (weasyprint, wkhtmltopdf)
Quality Guidelines
✅ Do
- Validate PDF exists before processing
- Handle corrupted PDFs gracefully with try/except blocks
- Extract text page-by-page to manage memory with large files
- Preserve PDF metadata when merging/splitting
- Use context managers (
with open()) for file operations
❌ Don't
- Load entire large PDFs into memory at once
- Assume all PDFs have selectable text (may be scanned images)
- Modify original files without creating backups
- Ignore PDF version compatibility issues
- Forget to handle password-protected PDFs
What this file has done since we first saw it
Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.
- 8d ago First seen · 121 lines · 961 tokens per session scan A 18939a485c79
Copilot-Skills pdf-handling.instructions.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository TheSethRose/Copilot-Skills (3 stars, last pushed 9mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 961 tokens to every session, about $0.0048 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.
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