Pdf

This is your go-to when users need to manipulate PDFs in any way. It handles the full spectrum: extracting text and tables with pdfplumber, merging and splitting with pypdf, creating new PDFs from scratch with reportlab, OCR on scanned documents, and form filling. The guide is practical, with working code snippets for every common operation. One callout worth noting: there's a specific warning about never using Unicode subscript/superscript characters in reportlab because they render as black boxes, use XML tags instead. It covers both Python libraries and command-line tools like qpdf, so you can pick the right approach for the task.

skills.sh installs: 821
GitHub stars: 33.2K
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add davila7/claude-code-templates --skill pdf --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

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.

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)

SKILL.md on GitHub