PDF to Text

Convert PDFs into layout-preserving plain text. Each word is placed on a character grid that mirrors its on-page position, so columns, indentation, and tabular alignment survive the conversion. This is significantly higher quality than reading a PDF directly with the read tool, which only extracts loose text without spatial fidelity.

When to use this vs. pdf-to-markdown

• Use pdf-to-text when the downstream consumer is plain-text only (a non-Markdown LLM, a grep/awk pipeline, a CSV-style table extractor that cares about column alignment).
• Use pdf-to-markdown when the consumer benefits from semantic structure (headings, lists, tables, reading order). Most RAG and LLM-context pipelines fall here.

Related Nutrient skills

• query — once a file is extracted, search it instead of reading a large output back into context: ranked BM-25 search that returns only the top line windows ("parse once, query many"). Add it the way your agent installs skills.

Usage

Before running any commands, set SKILL_DIR to the absolute path of the directory containing this SKILL.md file. Use $SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-text in all commands below.

The $SKILL_DIR/bin/pdf-to-text wrapper automatically installs the platform-specific binary into ~/.local/share/nutrient/cli/ from the CDN. It caches the binary and only checks for updates every 6 hours, so subsequent runs are fast. The same binary backs pdf-to-markdown, pdf-to-text, and self-update, so installing either skill gets you the same ~/.local/share/nutrient/cli/ install.