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.
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Security analysis or source-hub review identified patterns requiring attention.
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Security assessment
Risk score
44/100
Recommendation
CAUTION
Severity
MEDIUM
Savant decision
Review advised
The assessment recommends caution with a risk score of 20/100 or more; review its findings before use. Static security analysis completed.
5 patterns found
- analysis-evasion: reference.md (partial)high · SKILL.md:301 · Referenced artifact was not completely inspected
- MCP Least Privilege: Skill declares no tool scope ('permissions' or 'allowed-tools') but code capabilities were detected: file_read, file_write.medium · SKILL.md:1 · Without declared permissions the skill's intent is opaque and cannot be validated.
- Privilege Escalation: sudomedium · ocr.md:115 · Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
- Privilege Escalation: sudomedium · ocr.md:124 · Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
- Privilege Escalation: sudomedium · ocr.md:136 · Commands invoke sudo or root privileges. Verify this elevated access is necessary and justified.
Structure
- Ships 8 executable scriptsscripts/check_bounding_boxes_test.py, scripts/check_bounding_boxes.py, scripts/check_fillable_fields.py, scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py, scripts/create_validation_image.py, …. Review what they do before enabling the skill for agents with tool access.
- No license declaredConfirm you may reuse this skill before importing it into your repository.
- The source hub's security checks flagged this skillGen Agent Trust Hub: warn (This skill provides a comprehensive toolkit for PDF manipulation, including extraction, form filling, and OCR. It relies on standard industry libraries but performs runtime modification (monkeypatching) of its dependencies to work around upstream bugs. As it processes untrusted PDF documents, it possesses an inherent surface for indirect prompt injection.); Runlayer: warn (13/13 files flagged)
SKILL.md
---
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.
---
# PDF Processing Guide
## Overview
This guide covers essential PDF processing operations using Python libraries and command-line tools. For advanced features, JavaScript libraries, and detailed examples, see reference.md. If you need to fill out a PDF form, read forms.md and follow its instructions.
## Prerequisites
Python dependencies are resolved automatically by `uv run` — every script declares them in its PEP 723 header. Some workflows also need system tools:
- **poppler** (`brew install poppler` / `apt-get install poppler-utils`) — provides `pdftoppm` and `pdftotext`; required by the form-filling workflow, which converts PDF pages to images via pdf2image
- **tesseract** (`brew install tesseract tesseract-lang`) — only for OCR on scanned documents (see [ocr.md](ocr.md))
- **qpdf** (`brew install qpdf`) — only for the command-line recipes in the qpdf section below
## Quick Start
```python
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
```python
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
```python
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)
```
#### Extract Metadata
```python
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
meta = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {meta.title}")
print(f"Author: {meta.author}")
print(f"Subject: {meta.subject}")
print(f"Creator: {meta.creator}")
```
#### Rotate Pages
```python
reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
page = reader.pages[0]
page.rotate(90) # Rotate 90 degrees clockwise
writer.add_page(page)
with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as output:
writer.write(output)
```
### pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction
#### Extract Text with Layout
```python
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
for page in pdf.pages:
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)
```
#### Extract Tables
```python
with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
for i, page in enumerate(pdf.pages):
tables = page.extract_tables()
for j, table in enumerate(tables):
print(f"Table {j+1} on page {i+1}:")
for row in table:
print(row)
```
#### Advanced Table Extraction
```python
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: # Check if table is not empty
df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
all_tables.append(df)
# Combine all tables
if all_tables:
combined_df = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True)
combined_df.to_excel("extracted_tables.xlsx", index=False)
```
### reportlab - Create PDFs
#### Basic PDF Creation
```python
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
c = canvas.Canvas("hello.pdf", pagesize=letter)
width, height = letter
# Add text
c.drawString(100, height - 100, "Hello World!")
c.drawString(100, height - 120, "This is a PDF created with reportlab")
# Add a line
c.line(100, height - 140, 400, height - 140)
# Save
c.save()
```
#### Create PDF with Multiple Pages
```python
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer, PageBreak
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf", pagesize=letter)
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
story = []
# Add content
title = Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Title'])
story.append(title)
story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
body = Paragraph("This is the body of the report. " * 20, styles['Normal'])
story.append(body)
story.append(PageBreak())
# Page 2
story.append(Paragraph("Page 2", styles['Heading1']))
story.append(Paragraph("Content for page 2", styles['Normal']))
# Build PDF
doc.build(story)
```
## Command-Line Tools
### pdftotext (poppler-utils)
```bash
# Extract text
pdftotext input.pdf output.txt
# Extract text preserving layout
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt
# Extract specific pages
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 input.pdf output.txt # Pages 1-5
```
### qpdf
```bash
# Merge PDFs
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf
# Split pages
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- pages1-5.pdf
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 6-10 -- pages6-10.pdf
# Rotate pages
qpdf input.pdf output.pdf --rotate=+90:1 # Rotate page 1 by 90 degrees
# Remove password
qpdf --password=mypassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf
```
### pdftk (if available)
```bash
# Merge
pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf
# Split
pdftk input.pdf burst
# Rotate
pdftk input.pdf rotate 1east output rotated.pdf
```
## Common Tasks
### Extract Text from Scanned PDFs
```python
# Dependencies declared via PEP 723 in each script; resolved automatically by uv run
import pytesseract
from pdf2image import convert_from_path
# Convert PDF to images
images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')
# OCR each page
text = ""
for i, image in enumerate(images):
text += f"Page {i+1}:\n"
text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
text += "\n\n"
print(text)
```
### Add Watermark
```python
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
# Create watermark (or load existing)
watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf").pages[0]
# Apply to all pages
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
page.merge_page(watermark)
writer.add_page(page)
with open("watermarked.pdf", "wb") as output:
writer.write(output)
```
### Extract Images
```bash
# Using pdfimages (poppler-utils)
pdfimages -j input.pdf output_prefix
# This extracts all images as output_prefix-000.jpg, output_prefix-001.jpg, etc.
```
### Password Protection
```python
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
writer.add_page(page)
# Add password
writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")
with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as output:
writer.write(output)
```
## 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 |
| Command line merge | qpdf | `qpdf --empty --pages ...` |
| OCR scanned PDFs | pytesseract | Convert to image first |
| Fill PDF forms | pypdf | See forms.md |
## Next Steps
- **Complex table extraction**: For multi-page tables, borderless tables, and detection tuning, see [tables.md](tables.md)
- **Scanned PDF processing**: For OCR with image preprocessing, see [ocr.md](ocr.md)
- **Form filling**: For fillable and non-fillable PDF forms, see [forms.md](forms.md)
- **Advanced features**: For pypdfium2, JavaScript libraries (pdf-lib), and troubleshooting, see [reference.md](reference.md)