Pdf

Reach for this one when you need Claude to read, split, merge, or generate PDFs in bulk, or to fill out a form. The guide leans on pypdf for merging and splitting, pdfplumber for pulling text and tables (including straight into pandas for Excel export), and reportlab for building new documents, with qpdf and pdftotext covering the command line. It also handles scanned PDFs through pytesseract OCR and adds watermarks and password protection. The form-filling workflow is split into a separate forms.md, so the main skill stays lean. My honest take: the Python snippets are practical and copy-ready, but the OCR path needs Tesseract installed system-wide, which the instructions gloss over, and the license is proprietary, so check LICENSE.txt before building it into anything commercial.

GitHub stars: 1.4K
last updated: Jul 14, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add Prat011/awesome-llm-skills --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