Name: pdf
Author: appautomaton

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 files You already know pypdf, pdfplumber and reportlab. This skill adds what they don't give you: form filling scripts that check their own input, a way to see pages as a reader will, and the PDF behaviours that silently put content in the wrong place. Running scripts <skill is the directory containing this file. Run bundled scripts by absolute path from the user's working directory, so relative paths to their files keep working: Run Python you write with its dependencies declared, either uv run with pypdf script.py or a PEP 723 header. Rendering pages needs poppler ( pdftoppm ); OCR also needs Tesseract. Choosing a tool Task Use Fill a form, fillable or flat [forms.md](forms.md), always. It has scripts for every step. Text pdfplumber, or pdftotext layout from the command line. Text missing from pages that visibly have it means a scan: see [ocr.md](ocr.md). Tables pdfplumber: see [tables.md](tables.md) New PDFs reportlab: Platypus for flowing documents, canvas for exact placement Merge, split, rotate, crop, stamp, encrypt pypdf: see [reference.md](reference.md) for the calls that keep bookmarks, links and orientation intact See what a page looks like scripts/convert pdf to images.py Checking the output Whenever you create or change a PDF, render the pages you touched and look at them before delivering. Check that the text is present and readable, nothing is clipped or overlapping, and every stamp or value is where it belongs: Pitfalls that fail silently Two coordinate systems. PDF coordinates start at the bottom left of the page box, in points. pdfplumber and page images start at the top left. The page box need not start at (0, 0), so read page.cropbox.left and .bottom . Rotated pages. /Rotate turns a page only for display; content and form fields keep unrotated coordinates. Anything placed with a plain scale and y flip lands in the wrong spot. Convert boxes with scripts/pdf coords.py , and call page.transfer rotation to content() before stamping. Non Latin text in new PDFs. reportlab's built in fonts draw Chinese, Cyrillic and similar scripts as black boxes. Register and embed a TrueType font; see [reference.md](reference.md fonts for new pdfs). Merging. PdfWriter.append() keeps bookmarks and links, while copying pages with add page() drops them. Merged forms with matching field names become one field, so filling one fills both. AES encryption needs uv run with 'pypdf[crypto]' . Without it, pypdf raises DependencyError on open or on encrypt. Scripts Script Does check fillable fields.py <pdf Says which form path in forms.md applies extract form field info.py <pdf <out.json Lists fillable fields, their pages, boxes and accepted values fill fillable fields.py <pdf <values.json <out.pdf Fills fields after checking every id, page and value convert pdf to images.py <pdf <dir [ pages] [ fields] Renders pages one at a time to PNG, optionally outlining each fillable field check bounding boxes.py <fields.json [pdf] Finds overlapping or too short boxes before a flat form is filled create validation image.py <page <fields.json <png <out.png Draws those boxes on a page image for checking by eye fill pdf form with annotations.py <pdf <fields.json <out.pdf Fills a flat form with text that renders identically everywhere flatten form.py <pdf <out.pdf Draws filled values into the page so they can't be edited pdf coords.py <pdf <page <WxH to pdf/ to image <box Converts boxes between page image pixels and PDF points