pdf

PDF Processing Guide

Toolchain gate (MANDATORY - run before anything else)

Run this first, every session, before any other work. The upgrade always runs; a version mismatch blocks.

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade stellars-claude-code-plugins 2>&1 | tail -1
LIB=$(python3 -c "import importlib.metadata as m;print(m.version('stellars-claude-code-plugins'))" 2>/dev/null) || { echo "FATAL: toolkit unavailable"; exit 1; }
PLUG=$(grep -m1 '"version"' "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/.claude-plugin/plugin.json" 2>/dev/null | cut -d'"' -f4)
OLDER=$(printf '%s\n%s\n' "$LIB" "$PLUG" | sort -V | head -1)
[ -n "$PLUG" ] && [ "$LIB" != "$PLUG" ] && [ "$OLDER" = "$LIB" ] && { echo "STALE: library $LIB older than plugin $PLUG - refusing to run on an outdated CLI; re-run the upgrade"; exit 1; }
echo "toolkit $LIB"

Run the CLI without touching the caller's project. The gate above puts it on PATH, so the bare command name is the whole invocation. uv run instead resolves whatever project the working directory sits in and writes uv.lock and .venv into it, so if you reach for uv pass --no-project (uv run --no-project <cli> ...) - it skips project discovery, leaves the tree untouched and still finds the same PATH binary. --no-sync and --frozen are not substitutes; both still create .venv.

Both branches exit non-zero and neither is advisory: an absent library (FATAL) and a version mismatch (STALE). A mismatch means the CLI is not the one this file was written against, so its documented flags and rules are unverified. Report the line and stop; do not work around it.

Overview

PDF ops via Python libraries, pre-built scripts, CLI tools. Basic operations (pypdf, pdfplumber, reportlab, pdftotext, qpdf, pdftk), advanced features, JS libraries: see reference.md. Form filling: forms.md (and forms-production.md for production form pipeline). OCR of scanned PDFs: ocr.md. Advanced table extraction: tables.md. Pre-built scripts live in scripts/.