pdf

A toolkit and set of instructions for reading, creating, editing, and inspecting PDF files. PDFs are fixed-layout documents that can contain text, tables, forms, or scanned page images.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps extract text and tables, rearrange or merge pages, handle forms and metadata, protect files, and render pages as images for inspection.
Why use it?
It helps choose the right method for the file, especially when a PDF is scanned and needs OCR rather than ordinary text extraction.

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/smith-network-solutions/threadknot/pdf
Any agent
npx skills add smith-network-solutions/threadknot --skill pdf
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/smith-network-solutions/threadknot

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,504 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 $0.00088 $0.01504
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.00752
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00301
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00150

Measured 2d ago against content hash 6919b25fd6bc, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pdf 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.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 3 executable files (scripts/extract.py, scripts/pdftool.py, scripts/topdf.py), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/pdf/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PDF files

Which tool depends on the verb:

Task Tool
Rearrange pages, merge, split, rotate, encrypt, metadata, forms pypdf (scripts/pdftool.py)
Extract text, and especially tables pdfplumber (scripts/extract.py)
Make a PDF from HTML/CSS WeasyPrint, or LibreOffice for an Office source
Make a PDF programmatically (precise placement) reportlab
Look at a page rasterise — scripts/extract.py --png

Avoid PyMuPDF/fitz. It is widely recommended and technically excellent, but it is AGPL-3.0 or paid-commercial, which quietly infects whatever it touches. Everything above is MIT or BSD.

Inspect before you act

scripts/pdftool.py info report.pdf

Page count, per-page size and rotation, metadata, encryption status, whether it has form fields, and whether the pages carry extractable text or are scanned images. The last one decides your whole approach — no text extractor will get anything out of a scan, and the answer is OCR, not a different library.

Extracting text and tables

scripts/extract.py report.pdf                     # all text
scripts/extract.py report.pdf --pages 1-3         # a range
scripts/extract.py report.pdf --tables            # tables as CSV
scripts/extract.py report.pdf --layout            # preserve visual columns

--tables uses pdfplumber's ruling-line detection, which works well on tables that have visible borders and poorly on those laid out with whitespace alone. For the whitespace kind, --layout plus your own parsing is usually faster than fighting the table detector.

Text comes out in the PDF's internal content order, which is not always reading order — multi-column academic papers commonly interleave. --layout reconstructs position-aware text and is the fix.

Scanned documents

If info reports little or no extractable text, the pages are images:

scripts/extract.py scan.pdf --ocr --pages 1-5

Needs tesseract on PATH (apt install tesseract-ocr, brew install tesseract). It rasterises each page and OCRs it. Slow — always scope with --pages while iterating.

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files 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. 2d ago First seen · 148 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 6919b25fd6bc

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pdf is a skill published in the GitHub repository smith-network-solutions/threadknot (5 stars, last pushed 8d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 1,504 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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