pdf-vision

A PDF converter that uses image understanding to turn scanned or visually complex documents into clean Markdown, including tables and multi-column pages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to convert PDFs, process document archives, and extract structured information from forms, contracts, academic papers, and other difficult documents.
Why use it?
It helps when ordinary text extraction loses structure or returns unusable results from scans, footnotes, flowcharts, or degraded files.

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/cdeistopened/skill-stack/pdf-vision
Any agent
npx skills add cdeistopened/skill-stack --skill pdf-vision
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cdeistopened/skill-stack

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 123 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,460 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 $0.00123 $0.01460
Opus 5 $0.00062 $0.00730
Sonnet 5 $0.00025 $0.00292
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00146

Measured 2d ago against content hash 94513330432b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pdf-vision 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 2d 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.

public/skills/pdf-vision/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

pdf-vision

Vision-powered PDF processing that sees documents the way humans do — not as coordinates and font metadata, but as structured content with meaning.

When to Use

  • Converting PDFs to clean markdown (especially scanned, multi-column, or complex layouts)
  • Processing documents that pypdf/pdfplumber/Acrobat garble (tables, flowcharts, footnotes)
  • Batch processing document archives
  • Extracting structured data from government forms, legal contracts, academic papers
  • Any PDF task where text-based extraction fails or returns nothing

Quick Start

# Install dependencies
pip install pymupdf google-genai

# Set API key
export GEMINI_API_KEY=your-key

# Analyze a PDF (preflight — no OCR, just document analysis)
python scripts/preflight.py document.pdf

# Convert PDF to markdown
python scripts/ocr_pipeline.py document.pdf

# Convert with custom output path
python scripts/ocr_pipeline.py document.pdf -o output.md

# Convert with specific chunk size
python scripts/ocr_pipeline.py document.pdf -c 8

# Learn from a correction
python scripts/learn.py original.md corrected.md

How It Works

1. Preflight Analysis (~$0.005)

Samples 8 pages from beginning, middle, and end of the document. Sends to Gemini flash-lite to detect: document type, language, column layout, footnotes, tables, scan quality, running headers/footers, text density. Configures the entire pipeline automatically.

Why scattered sampling: A 123-page Latin manuscript with an English preface fools a first-5-pages sample. Sampling beginning + middle + end correctly detects the real document characteristics.

2. Two-Tier Model Routing

Routes documents to the right model based on difficulty:

Difficulty Model Cost/1M tokens (in/out)
Clean digital gemini-2.5-flash-lite $0.10 / $0.40
Everything else gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview $0.25 / $1.50

Why two tiers: We tested three models on the same 10 Latin manuscript pages. Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite extracted 4x more content (214K vs 50K chars) than 3.0 Flash Preview, while costing half as much. The cheap model handles clean digital docs fine. Everything else goes to 3.1.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

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. 2d ago First seen · 133 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A 94513330432b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pdf-vision is a skill published in the GitHub repository cdeistopened/skill-stack (27 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 123 tokens to every session and 1,460 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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