pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9

pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9 is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from HKUDS/OpenSpace. It costs 25 tokens per session (1,872 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A PDF download and text-extraction workflow with several fallback methods and early checks for failed downloads.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps retrieve and extract text from regulatory documents, handbooks, and other difficult PDFs.
Why use it?
PDFs may be blocked by JavaScript, damaged, encoded unexpectedly, or replaced by an error page. The checks help detect these problems before extraction continues.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit It helps retrieve and extract text from regulatory documents, handbooks, and other difficult PDFs.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9
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-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9
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-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hkuds/openspace/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,872 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 2 findings. 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 $0.00025 $0.01872
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00936
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00374
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00187

Measured 4d ago against content hash b2475dbc5a82, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9 scanned grade A with 2 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 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.

curl -L -o document.pdf "URL_HERE"

Runs shell commandslowCapability

Expected in a hook, worth knowing in a rule or an instructions file.

result = subprocess.run(
benchmarks/gdpval/skills/pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9/SKILL.md · 258 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 258 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PDF Extraction Fallbacks

This skill provides a robust workflow for extracting text from PDFs when source documents may fail to download or extract due to JavaScript protection, CORS restrictions, or encoding issues.

When to Use

  • Downloading regulatory documents from government/agency websites
  • Extracting text from PDFs that may be JavaScript-protected
  • Handling PDFs with potential CORS or encoding issues
  • When you need reliable text extraction with guaranteed fallbacks

Core Workflow

Step 1: Download with Validation

# Download PDF and immediately validate
curl -L -o document.pdf "URL_HERE"

# Check file size (reject if < 1KB - likely error page)
FILE_SIZE=$(stat -f%z document.pdf 2>/dev/null || stat -c%s document.pdf 2>/dev/null)
if [ "$FILE_SIZE" -lt 1024 ]; then
    echo "FAIL: File too small ($FILE_SIZE bytes) - likely error page"
    # Log the actual content to diagnose
    head -c 500 document.pdf
    exit 1
fi

# Check for HTML/error content instead of PDF
if head -c 500 document.pdf | grep -qi "<!DOCTYPE html\|<html\|error\|access denied"; then
    echo "FAIL: Downloaded HTML/error page instead of PDF"
    exit 1
fi

Step 2: Sequential Extraction Fallbacks

Try extraction methods in order of reliability:

Fallback 1: pdftotext (poppler-utils)

if command -v pdftotext &> /dev/null; then
    pdftotext -layout document.pdf output.txt 2>/dev/null
    if [ -s output.txt ] && [ $(wc -c < output.txt) -gt 100 ]; then
        echo "SUCCESS: pdftotext extraction"
        exit 0
    fi
fi

Fallback 2: PyMuPDF (fitz)

import fitz  # PyMuPDF

def extract_with_pymupdf(pdf_path):
    try:
        doc = fitz.open(pdf_path)
        text = ""
        for page in doc:
            text += page.get_text()
        doc.close()
        if len(text.strip()) > 100:
            return text
        return None
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"PyMuPDF failed: {e}")
        return None

Fallback 3: pdfplumber

import pdfplumber

def extract_with_pdfplumber(pdf_path):
    try:
        text = ""
        with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
            for page in pdf.pages:
                page_text = page.extract_text()
                if page_text:
                    text += page_text + "\n"
        if len(text.strip()) > 100:
            return text
        return None
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"pdfplumber failed: {e}")
        return None

Read the full file on GitHub · 258 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 · 258 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A b2475dbc5a82

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pdf-extraction-fallbacks-7d54a9 is a skill published in the GitHub repository HKUDS/OpenSpace (7,534 stars, last pushed 26d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 1,872 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 2 findings (makes network calls, runs shell commands). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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