Pdf

Handles the full range of PDF operations you'd expect: merging, splitting, extracting text and tables, OCR on scanned documents, watermarks, encryption, and form filling. Built on pypdf, pdfplumber, and reportlab, with solid examples for each. The table extraction with pdfplumber looks especially clean if you're dumping to Excel. One nice touch is the explicit warning about Unicode subscript characters breaking in reportlab fonts, they document the XML tag workaround instead. Also includes command line options with qpdf and poppler-utils if you prefer that route. Good practical reference when you need to manipulate PDFs without reaching for a heavyweight solution.

GitHub stars: 460
last updated: Jun 7, 2026

View on GitHub

Install

$ npx -y skills add malob/nix-config --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