extract-pdf

extract-pdf is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from AI4CreativityLab/Index.skill. It costs 125 tokens per session (3,878 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A PDF-reading tool that turns documents into Markdown while also rendering each page as an image. It keeps headings, tables, lists, and visual content available for review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to read, parse, summarize, analyze, OCR, transcribe, or inspect a local PDF or a PDF from a URL.
Why use it?
It helps avoid losing tables, figures, page layout, formulas, or scanned text during PDF extraction.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ai4creativitylab/index.skill/extract-pdf
Any agent
npx skills add AI4CreativityLab/Index.skill --skill extract-pdf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AI4CreativityLab/Index.skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote 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.

agentmods badge for extract-pdf

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai4creativitylab/index.skill/extract-pdf.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai4creativitylab/index.skill/extract-pdf)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ai4creativitylab/index.skill/extract-pdf"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ai4creativitylab/index.skill/extract-pdf.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 125 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,878 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00125 $0.03878
Opus 5 $0.00063 $0.01939
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00776
Haiku 4.5 $0.00013 $0.00388

Measured 4d ago against content hash b4fe84c1bd91, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

extract-pdf 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/extract_pdf.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

.claude/skills/extract-pdf/SKILL.md · 249 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 249 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

You are the PDF Extractor. Your job is to turn any PDF into a structured workspace that the calling agent (Claude) can read directly — markdown files for the textual content (with tables, headings, and lists preserved), PNG files for the visual content. There is no separate vision API in the loop: Claude itself reads the rendered page images with its built-in Read tool.

Why this skill exists

Naive PDF text extraction loses figures, tables, formulas, layout, and anything in scanned pages. The classic workaround is to send each page image to an external vision model, which adds API keys, cost, and rate limiting. Heavy ML pipelines (Marker, Nougat, MinerU, Docling) need GBs of model weights and a GPU. Claude is already multimodal, so the right move is to compose lightweight tools and let Claude handle anything that needs vision:

  1. Render each page to PNG locally with PyMuPDF. No system dependencies, no poppler, no ML.
  2. Extract structured Markdown with pymupdf4llm — the official LLM-targeted PDF→Markdown extractor from the PyMuPDF maintainers. It detects tables, headings, lists, and code blocks and preserves them as proper Markdown so Claude can read them at a glance instead of squinting at column-aligned spaces.
  3. Run pdfminer.six in parallel on the same page set as a complementary plain-text extractor. PyMuPDF and pdfminer use different layout-analysis algorithms, and when one mangles a page (ligatures, columns, vertical text, weird encodings) the other often nails it. Disagreement between the two is itself a useful signal.
  4. Hand all of it to Claude as files it can Read on demand. For math, scanned pages, or figures where text extraction can't be exact, the agent reads the page image directly — no extra OCR step.

This makes PDF analysis a one-command operation that any future skill or task can reuse.

When to use

Trigger this skill whenever a task involves a PDF and any of:

  • "summarize / read / analyze / explain this PDF"
  • "extract text / tables / figures from a PDF"
  • "what does the chart on page 4 show?"
  • "convert this PDF to something I can work with / to markdown"
  • the PDF has scanned pages, math, diagrams, or complex layout
  • another skill (e.g. index-note for paper/book) needs structured PDF content

Read the full file on GitHub · 249 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

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.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 249 lines · 125 tokens per session scan A b4fe84c1bd91

Subscribe to this mod's changes

extract-pdf is a skill published in the GitHub repository AI4CreativityLab/Index.skill (77 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 125 tokens to every session and 3,878 once invoked, about $0.0006 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 2026-08-30.

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