pandoc-pdf-error-resolution

pandoc-pdf-error-resolution is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HKUDS/OpenSpace. It costs 17 tokens per session (1,096 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A troubleshooting workflow for recovering when Pandoc, a document conversion tool, reports an unclear error while creating a PDF.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to diagnose missing tools and select an appropriate engine such as XeLaTeX, LuaLaTeX, or wkhtmltopdf.
Why use it?
It provides checks for installation, available PDF engines, and alternative conversion attempts when the first command fails.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Good fit Use it to diagnose missing tools and select an appropriate engine such…

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hkuds/openspace/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution
About the project

OpenSpace is a skill-management layer for AI agents that stores, retrieves, evaluates, shares, and improves reusable workflows. It is intended for people using multiple coding agents who want skills to be reused and refined based on task outcomes. The catalogue provides 200 skills for use with OpenSpace and the agents it supports.

HKUDS/OpenSpace · 7,510 stars · on GitHub

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 HKUDS/OpenSpace --skill pandoc-pdf-error-resolution
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/HKUDS/OpenSpace

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 pandoc-pdf-error-resolution

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,096 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.
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 5.1 $0.00017 $0.01096
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00548
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00219
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00110

Measured 3d ago against content hash 56477224a17d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pandoc-pdf-error-resolution 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 3d 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.

benchmarks/gdpval/skills/pandoc-pdf-error-resolution/SKILL.md · 145 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 145 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Pandoc PDF Error Resolution

This skill provides a step-by-step workflow for diagnosing and resolving "unknown error" messages when using pandoc to generate PDFs.

When to Use

Use this skill when:

  • Pandoc returns an "unknown error" during PDF conversion
  • The conversion succeeds for other formats (e.g., markdown, HTML) but fails for PDF
  • You need to identify which PDF engine is available and working

Step-by-Step Procedure

Step 1: Verify Pandoc Installation

First, confirm pandoc is installed and check its version:

pandoc --version

This confirms pandoc is available and shows the version number. Note that pandoc itself doesn't generate PDFs directly—it delegates to external PDF engines.

Step 2: Check Available PDF Engines

Identify which PDF engines are installed on the system:

which pdflatex xelatex lualatex wkhtmltopdf pdfroff 2>/dev/null || echo "Checking individual engines..."
which pdflatex
which xelatex
which lualatex
which wkhtmltopdf

Common engines and their characteristics:

  • pdflatex: Fast, widely available, good for basic documents
  • xelatex: Better Unicode/font support, recommended for complex documents
  • lualatex: Advanced typography, Lua scripting support
  • wkhtmltopdf: HTML-to-PDF conversion, good for web-style documents

Step 3: Attempt Conversion with Explicit Engine

Retry the conversion with an explicit --pdf-engine flag:

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex

Try engines in this order:

  1. xelatex (best Unicode support)
  2. pdflatex (most widely available)
  3. lualatex (if xelatex fails)
  4. wkhtmltopdf (for HTML-heavy content)

Step 4: Capture Full stderr Output

Always capture the complete error output before falling back:

pandoc input.md -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex 2>&1 | tee pandoc_error.log

This preserves the full error message for analysis. Common error patterns:

  • Font errors: Missing LaTeX packages or fonts
  • Package errors: Missing LaTeX packages (use tlmgr install <package>)
  • Syntax errors: Issues in the source document

Read the full file on GitHub · 145 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. 3d ago First seen · 145 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 56477224a17d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pandoc-pdf-error-resolution is a skill published in the GitHub repository HKUDS/OpenSpace (7,510 stars, last pushed 25d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 1,096 once invoked, about $0.0001 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 2026-09-03.

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