A toolkit guide for working with PDF files, including reading text and tables, creating documents, combining or splitting pages, and filling forms. It also covers OCR, which reads text from scanned page images.

Use it to extract content, create or edit PDFs, merge or split files, fill in forms, or process many documents programmatically.

It explains which Python libraries and command-line tools fit common PDF jobs, reducing trial and error when processing documents.

pdf — Skill for Claude Code by appautomaton/document-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 appautomaton/document-SKILLs --skill pdf

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/appautomaton/document-SKILLs

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install document-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 4 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/appautomaton/document-skills/pdf/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/appautomaton/document-skills/pdf)

Your own site

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

Per session 61 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,035 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket pass 15 Sept 2026
Snyk pass 15 Sept 2026
NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

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	$0.00061	$0.01035
Opus 5.5	$0.00024	$0.00414
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00012	$0.00207
Haiku 4.5	$0.00006	$0.00103

Measured 8d ago against content hash a520ce16bade, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

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 8d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 9 executable files (scripts/check_bounding_boxes.py, scripts/check_fillable_fields.py, scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.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.

pdf/SKILL.md · 60 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 60 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PDF files

You already know pypdf, pdfplumber and reportlab. This skill adds what they don't give you: form-filling scripts that check their own input, a way to see pages as a reader will, and the PDF behaviours that silently put content in the wrong place.

Running scripts

<skill> is the directory containing this file. Run bundled scripts by absolute path from the user's working directory, so relative paths to their files keep working:

uv run <skill>/scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py report.pdf pages

Run Python you write with its dependencies declared, either uv run --with pypdf script.py or a PEP 723 header. Rendering pages needs poppler (pdftoppm); OCR also needs Tesseract.

Choosing a tool

Task	Use
Fill a form, fillable or flat	forms.md, always. It has scripts for every step.
Text	pdfplumber, or `pdftotext -layout` from the command line. Text missing from pages that visibly have it means a scan: see ocr.md.
Tables	pdfplumber: see tables.md
New PDFs	reportlab: Platypus for flowing documents, canvas for exact placement
Merge, split, rotate, crop, stamp, encrypt	pypdf: see reference.md for the calls that keep bookmarks, links and orientation intact
See what a page looks like	`scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py`

Checking the output

Whenever you create or change a PDF, render the pages you touched and look at them before delivering. Check that the text is present and readable, nothing is clipped or overlapping, and every stamp or value is where it belongs:

uv run <skill>/scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py out.pdf check --pages 1-3

Pitfalls that fail silently

Two coordinate systems. PDF coordinates start at the bottom-left of the page box, in points. pdfplumber and page images start at the top-left. The page box need not start at (0, 0), so read page.cropbox.left and .bottom.
Rotated pages. /Rotate turns a page only for display; content and form fields keep unrotated coordinates. Anything placed with a plain scale and y-flip lands in the wrong spot. Convert boxes with scripts/pdf_coords.py, and call page.transfer_rotation_to_content() before stamping.
Non-Latin text in new PDFs. reportlab's built-in fonts draw Chinese, Cyrillic and similar scripts as black boxes. Register and embed a TrueType font; see reference.md.
Merging. PdfWriter.append() keeps bookmarks and links, while copying pages with add_page() drops them. Merged forms with matching field names become one field, so filling one fills both.
AES encryption needs uv run --with 'pypdf[crypto]'. Without it, pypdf raises DependencyError on open or on encrypt.

Read the full file on GitHub · 60 lines

Files

What ships with it

13 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.

8d ago Changed · -242 lines · +11 tokens per session a520ce16bade
1mo ago First seen · 302 lines · 50 tokens per session scan A cc9c6117f353

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pdf is a skill published in the GitHub repository appautomaton/document-SKILLs (174 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 61 tokens to every session and 1,035 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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