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.
npx skills add AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills --skill alterlab-pdf-exploregit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-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/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pdf-explore)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pdf-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pdf-explore/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pdf-explore"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/alterlab-ieu/alterlab-academic-skills/alterlab-pdf-explore.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 | $0.00150 | $0.00974 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00075 | $0.00487 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00030 | $0.00195 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00097 |
Grade A, and why
alterlab-pdf-explore 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 5d 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 — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
PDF Explore (deep single-document Q&A)
Overview
Reading one paper or report thoroughly means jumping between the methods, a results figure, a supplementary table, and an appendix — repeatedly. This skill parses a PDF once into a reusable index of sections, figures, and tables, then answers many questions across the whole document without re-parsing: compare what two sections say, extract every instance of a pattern, and read values off charts/tables.
It is the single-document deep-dive counterpart to the corpus-level tools: to build a
comparison table across many papers use alterlab-pdf-extract; to just convert a PDF
to Markdown use alterlab-markitdown.
When to Use This Skill
Use this skill when the user wants to:
- Interrogate one paper/report end-to-end (methods vs. results vs. appendix).
- Extract every occurrence of a pattern within a document (all p-values, all sample sizes, every mention of a gene).
- Read data off a figure or table inside the PDF.
- Feed precise, located answers into the literature-review or paper-review pipeline.
Does NOT Trigger
| Scenario | Use instead |
|---|---|
| Build a comparison table across many papers (one row per paper) | alterlab-pdf-extract |
| Convert a PDF/DOCX to clean Markdown | alterlab-markitdown |
| Manage references / DOIs / BibTeX | alterlab-pyzotero |
| Work with a Jupyter notebook | alterlab-open-notebook |
Core Capabilities
1. Parse-once, ask-many
Parse the PDF a single time into a structured index — page text with layout, detected section headings, figure/table regions, and (for scans) OCR'd text — then answer subsequent questions against that index instead of re-reading the file each time.
2. Cross-section questions
Answer questions that span the document: "does the discussion's claim match the methods' design?", "which limitations does the appendix add beyond the main text?". Cite the page and section for every answer so it is verifiable.
What ships with it
2 files 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.
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.
- 5d ago First seen · 82 lines · 150 tokens per session scan A 33089206d3b6
alterlab-pdf-explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository AlterLab-IEU/AlterLab-Academic-Skills (66 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 150 tokens to every session and 974 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-09-05.
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