PDF Skill

Create, combine, split, transform, and secure PDF files — merging, page manipulation, form filling, watermarks, encryption, and text/table extraction. For heavy text extraction from scanned documents prefer the ocr-and-documents skill; for natural-language edits to existing PDF text prefer nano-pdf.

When to Use

Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files: reading or extracting text/tables, combining or merging multiple PDFs, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting, extracting images, or OCR on scanned PDFs. If the user mentions a .pdf file or asks to produce one, use this skill.

Prerequisites

pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab
which pdftotext || sudo apt install -y poppler-utils   # pdftotext, pdftoppm, pdfimages
which qpdf || sudo apt install -y qpdf                 # CLI merge/split/decrypt

macOS: brew install poppler qpdf. OCR extras: pip install pytesseract pdf2image + sudo apt install -y tesseract-ocr.

Script paths below are relative to this skill's directory. Form filling has its own workflow — read forms.md and follow it. Advanced library usage (pypdfium2, pdf-lib) and troubleshooting: reference.md.