Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms. When Claude needs to fill in a PDF form or programmatically process, generate, or analyze PDF documents at scale.
Installation
Details
Usage
After installing, this skill will be available to your AI coding assistant.
Verify installation:
npx agent-skills-cli listSkill Instructions
name: pdf description: Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms. When Claude needs to fill in a PDF form or programmatically process, generate, or analyze PDF documents at scale. source: anthropics/skills license: Apache-2.0
PDF Processing Guide
Quick Start
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
# Read a PDF
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")
# Extract text
text = ""
for page in reader.pages:
text += page.extract_text()
Python Libraries
pypdf - Basic Operations
Merge PDFs
from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader
writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]:
reader = PdfReader(pdf_file)
for page in reader.pages:
writer.add_page(page)
with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output:
writer.write(output)
Split PDF
reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages):
writer = PdfWriter()
writer.add_page(page)
with open(f"page_{i+1}.pdf", "wb") as output:
writer.write(output)
pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction
Extract Tables
import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd
with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
all_tables = []
for page in pdf.pages:
tables = page.extract_tables()
for table in tables:
if table:
df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
all_tables.append(df)
reportlab - Create PDFs
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf", pagesize=letter)
width, height = letter
c.drawString(100, height - 100, "Hello World!")
c.save()
Command-Line Tools
# Extract text (poppler-utils)
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt
# Merge PDFs (qpdf)
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf
# Split pages
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- pages1-5.pdf
Quick Reference
| Task | Best Tool | Command/Code |
|---|---|---|
| Merge PDFs | pypdf | writer.add_page(page) |
| Split PDFs | pypdf | One page per file |
| Extract text | pdfplumber | page.extract_text() |
| Extract tables | pdfplumber | page.extract_tables() |
| Create PDFs | reportlab | Canvas or Platypus |
| OCR scanned PDFs | pytesseract | Convert to image first |
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