pdf-generation

PDF Generation

When to use this skill

• The user asks to "export as PDF", "save this as a PDF", "generate a PDF report" for data or text that is already in the conversation (e.g. output from a sas-score-* tool, or any other table/record data).
• Not for editing existing PDFs, extracting text from PDFs, or forms — this skill only writes new, simple text-based PDFs.

Prerequisite

This skill requires an execution environment that can run node and write a file to disk (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot's coding agent, a local CLI agent, etc.). It will not work in a chat-only integration with no code execution or file-write capability (e.g. a plain Teams/Copilot Studio bot with no plugin action wired up) — for those, the PDF must be produced by an actual tool/plugin action exposed by the server, not by an instructional skill.

Method

1. Write the script below to a temp file (e.g. generate-pdf.js) — verbatim, no npm install needed, it only uses Node's built-in fs.
2. Shape the data to render into { title, sections }:
   • title — string, optional report title.
   • sections — array of { heading, lines }:
     • heading — becomes a subheading (e.g. a record's id).
     • lines — array of strings, one per line (e.g. "name: value" pairs for every other column of that record). This maps directly onto the "stack" layout: one subheading per record, then label: value per remaining field.
3. Run: node generate-pdf.js <filename.pdf> '<json>' — pass the JSON as a single-quoted argument, or call generatePdf(data) programmatically from another script and write the returned Buffer to disk yourself.
4. The script always writes into the current user's standard Downloads folder (os.homedir()/Downloads), regardless of what path is passed in — only the filename portion is used. It creates the folder if missing, and falls back to the current working directory (with a warning) if the Downloads folder can't be created or written to, e.g. in a restricted sandbox with no writable home directory.
5. Tell the user the output file path (or attach/send it, if the host supports that).