pdf-download-extract-fallback

pdf-download-extract-fallback is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HKUDS/OpenSpace. It costs 18 tokens per session (2,322 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for downloading PDFs, checking that the files are valid, and extracting their text with fallback methods.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps process PDFs from web sources that use redirects, access controls, or dynamic pages.
Why use it?
Websites may redirect PDF requests, block automated downloads, or return non-PDF error pages. Validation and alternative extraction steps help diagnose and handle those cases.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Good fit It helps process PDFs from web sources that use redirects, access controls, or dynamic pages.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-download-extract-fallback
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 · 7,534 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 pdf-download-extract-fallback
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 pdf-download-extract-fallback

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-download-extract-fallback.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-download-extract-fallback)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-download-extract-fallback"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-download-extract-fallback.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 18 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,322 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • 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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00018 $0.02322
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.01161
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00464
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00232

Measured 4d ago against content hash 5ea87ed04cd2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pdf-download-extract-fallback scanned grade A 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 4d 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.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

Many PDF hosting sites use JavaScript-based redirects or block automated requests. Use curl with a realistic browser user-agent:
benchmarks/gdpval/skills/pdf-download-extract-fallback/SKILL.md · 291 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 291 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PDF Download and Extract with Fallback

This skill provides a robust workflow for acquiring PDF documents from web sources and extracting their text content, with multiple fallback mechanisms to handle various failure modes.

Overview

When working with PDFs from web sources, encounters with JavaScript redirects, corrupted files, missing tools, or inaccessible content are common. This workflow ensures maximum success rate through progressive fallback strategies.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Download PDF with Browser User-Agent

Many PDF hosting sites use JavaScript-based redirects or block automated requests. Use curl with a realistic browser user-agent:

curl -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" -o output.pdf "URL_HERE"

Key flags:

  • -L: Follow redirects
  • -A: Set user-agent header to mimic a real browser
  • -o: Specify output filename

Step 2: Verify File Type Before Parsing

Always validate the downloaded file is actually a PDF before attempting extraction:

file output.pdf

Expected output should contain "PDF document". If not:

  • The URL may have redirected to an HTML error page
  • The file may be corrupted
  • Access may be blocked

Step 3: Primary Extraction with pdftotext

First attempt extraction using the standard pdftotext utility (part of poppler-utils):

pdftotext output.pdf output.txt

If pdftotext is not available, install it:

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get update && apt-get install -y poppler-utils

# macOS
brew install poppler

# RHEL/CentOS
yum install -y poppler-utils

Step 4: Fallback to PyMuPDF (fitz)

If pdftotext fails or produces poor results, use Python's PyMuPDF library:

import fitz  # PyMuPDF

doc = fitz.open("output.pdf")
text = ""
for page in doc:
    text += page.get_text()
doc.close()

with open("output.txt", "w") as f:
    f.write(text)

Install if needed:

pip install pymupdf

Read the full file on GitHub · 291 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. 4d ago First seen · 291 lines · 18 tokens per session scan A 5ea87ed04cd2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pdf-download-extract-fallback is a skill published in the GitHub repository HKUDS/OpenSpace (7,534 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 18 tokens to every session and 2,322 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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