A document-conversion workflow for Stencila, a tool for working with structured documents. It converts files such as DOCX, PDF, LaTeX, JATS, notebooks, and Markdown, and can import papers using a DOI, arXiv ID, or PubMed Central ID.

Use it to convert documents between supported formats, choose how they are decoded, and record or review conversion losses.

Different document formats preserve different amounts of structure and content. It helps identify and report what a conversion may lose instead of hiding those changes.

conversion — Skill for Claude Code by stencila/stencila

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 stencila/stencila --skill conversion

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/stencila/stencila

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install stencila, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 13 skills, 2 agents, 2 hooks.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/stencila/stencila/conversion.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 81 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 899 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00081	$0.00899
Opus 5.5	$0.00032	$0.00360
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00016	$0.00180
Haiku 4.5	$0.00008	$0.00090

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 275545aa84f7, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

conversion 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 1mo 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.

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.

claude/skills/conversion/SKILL.md · 82 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 82 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Converting Stencila documents

NO_COLOR=1 stencila convert input.docx output.smd --yes

Formats are inferred from file extensions; --from/--to override. The input may be a path, a URL, or a bare identifier (see Ingestion below). stencila formats list prints the live capability table — which formats decode (From), encode (To), and are lossless. Consult it rather than guessing.

Lossless vs lossy

Only the data formats round-trip losslessly: CBOR, CBOR+Zstd, JSON, JSON+Zip, JSON5, JSON-LD, YAML. Everything else — DOCX, PDF, LaTeX, JATS, HTML, Markdown flavours, IPYNB — is lossy to some degree.

When converting to a lossy target, quantify what is dropped:

--input-losses — action on losses decoding the input
--output-losses — action on losses encoding the output

Both accept ignore, trace, debug (default), info, warn, error, abort, or a .json/.yaml filename to write the losses to. After a lossy conversion, tell the user what was lost rather than silently producing a smaller document.

Decoding options that matter

--fine / --coarse — decoding granularity. Fine (the default for most formats) decodes to the finest structure; coarse preserves un-modelled markup in larger blocks and is the default for LaTeX. Use --coarse when fine decoding of a partially supported format mangles structure.
--pages N-M / --exclude-pages — page selection for multi-page inputs (e.g. PDFs): --pages 1,3,5-7, --pages 2-, keywords odd/even.
--include-structuring / --exclude-structuring — structuring operations that infer document structure (sections, abstracts, references) from loosely structured input. Example: --include-structuring sections-to-abstract.
--ignore-artifacts — re-download / re-process instead of using cached intermediate artifacts in .stencila/artifacts/.

Ingesting published papers

convert accepts identifiers directly as the input — a DOI, arXiv id, or PubMed Central id — and fetches the document:

Read the full file on GitHub · 82 lines

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.

1mo ago First seen · 82 lines · 81 tokens per session scan A 275545aa84f7

Subscribe to this mod's changes

conversion is a skill published in the GitHub repository stencila/stencila (909 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 81 tokens to every session and 899 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-08-30.

Documents PDF document executable programmable

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Extract text from PDFs, fill forms, and merge documents.

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docutranslate

Use when translating documents locally via LLM — PDF, Word, Excel, Markdown, SRT subtitles with format preservation. DocuTranslate: LLM-powered multi-format local file translation tool with MCP server support.

znlgis/opengis-skills · 47 tokens

docx

Read, create, and convert Microsoft Word (.docx) documents — extract text and tables, build reports from markdown/JSON, and export to PDF.

zhixuli0406/DuDuClaw · 34 tokens

pdf

Read and create PDF documents — extract text (and per-page text) from a PDF to JSON/markdown, and render markdown/plain text into a new PDF.