What is render-pdf-doc?

A tool for turning academic Markdown documents into publication-quality PDFs using Pandoc and XeLaTeX. It covers documents such as research proposals, briefing handouts, IRB materials, and reference tables.

Use it to render English or Korean non-bibliography documents into PDFs with controlled tables and page layout.

It handles layout problems that commonly make academic PDFs hard to read, including multilingual fonts and badly sized table columns.

render-pdf-doc — Skill for Claude Code by Aperivue/medsci-skills

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.

Any agent

npx skills add Aperivue/medsci-skills --skill render-pdf-doc

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Aperivue/medsci-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install medsci-presentation, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 5 skills.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aperivue/medsci-skills/render-pdf-doc.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 67 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 2,222 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan B 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026

SkillSpector: 1 finding, up to medium

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

medium Privilege Escalation · line 56
Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.

Fix: Avoid sudo/root unless strictly required. Prefer least-privilege patterns. If elevation is needed, document the justification and scope.

How audits are shown

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00067	$0.02222
Opus 5.5	$0.00027	$0.00889
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00013	$0.00444
Haiku 4.5	$0.00007	$0.00222

Measured 23d ago against content hash 770bcc52e57c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade B, and why

render-pdf-doc scanned grade B with 1 finding 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 23d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 7 executable files (scripts/check_deps.sh, scripts/infer_colwidths.py, scripts/render_pdf.sh, …), 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.

Asks for rootmediumPrivilege escalation

A mod that escalates privileges can change anything on the machine, not only the project.

sudo apt-get install pandoc texlive-xetex texlive-lang-cjk fonts-noto-cjk

skills/render-pdf-doc/SKILL.md · 169 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 169 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Render-PDF-Doc Skill

This skill handles layout only (CJK fonts, table column widths) with raw pandoc + xelatex — no Quarto, whose tbl-colwidths has reported PDF regressions (issues 6089/9200). Not for: a manuscript with a bibliography (/manage-refs scripts/render_pandoc.sh), an institutional .docx form (/fill-protocol), the ICMJE COI form (/fill-icmje-coi), figures or PPTX (/make-figures, /present-paper).

Dependencies

Python 3 is required by the wrapper. FontTools is optional for the font-file coverage check (python3 -m pip install fonttools).

# macOS
brew install pandoc
brew install --cask mactex-no-gui          # xelatex + xeCJK (~5 GB)

# Linux
sudo apt-get install pandoc texlive-xetex texlive-lang-cjk fonts-noto-cjk

# Windows (PowerShell) — run in Git Bash afterwards
winget install --id JohnMacFarlane.Pandoc
winget install --id MiKTeX.MiKTeX          # xelatex; installs missing LaTeX packages on demand
# No CJK font download needed: Malgun Gothic ships with Windows 7+ and is the default here.

Detection:

bash scripts/check_deps.sh

On Windows / Git Bash, MiKTeX's bin directory (%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\MiKTeX\miktex\bin\x64) is often not on PATH; both check_deps.sh and render_pdf.sh probe it. If xelatex still reads [MISS], add that directory to PATH.

Workflow

Step 1 — Author markdown with frontmatter

---
title: "Paper 2 Calibration Anchor — Q&A Grid"
author: "<Author Group>"
date: "2026-05-01"
mainfont: "Apple SD Gothic Neo"        # macOS default
CJKmainfont: "Apple SD Gothic Neo"
geometry: "margin=0.85in"
fontsize: 11pt
linestretch: 1.25
colorlinks: true
---

Set both mainfont and CJKmainfont: without CJKmainfont, Hangul falls back to Times New Roman (broken glyphs or blanks). Use Noto Sans CJK KR on Linux/CI and Malgun Gothic on Windows; the render script auto-detects the per-OS default when the fields are absent.
Read every number in a table from the source CSV or analysis output. Do not retype a number from prose or carry one forward from an earlier draft — a table correct in v3 is not evidence it is correct in v4.
A circulation PDF carries no change history, internal version numbers (e.g. v3.2.2) or PI attribution: put them in a separate circulation file or a supplementary. Keep the received primary source (the .docx or .eml a co-author sent) unmodified as its own artifact — the PDF is a derivative, and the next round is diffed against the source. If that source was AI-drafted by a collaborator, re-derive every number, denominator and author-year in it from the underlying paper or analysis output before it reaches the PDF.

Read the full file on GitHub · 169 lines

Files

What ships with it

20 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.

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.

23d ago Changed · +5 lines 770bcc52e57c
25d ago Changed · -65 lines · -71 tokens per session 31d264d9bf75
26d ago Changed · +9 lines 6eb5d087fb46
1mo ago Changed · +23 lines cb3856e4b0ae
1mo ago First seen · 197 lines · 138 tokens per session scan B 97af21fac95a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

render-pdf-doc is a skill published in the GitHub repository Aperivue/medsci-skills (349 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 67 tokens to every session and 2,222 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it B with 1 finding (asks for root). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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render-pdf-doc