Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting PDFs, ext

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 Python Libraries pypdf Basic Operations Merge PDFs Split PDF Extract Metadata Rotate Pages pdfplumber Text and Table Extraction Extract Text with Layout Extract Tables Advanced Table Extraction reportlab Create PDFs Basic PDF Creation Create PDF with Multiple Pages Subscripts and Superscripts IMPORTANT : Never use Unicode subscript/superscript characters (₀₁₂₃₄₅₆₇₈₉, ⁰¹²³⁴⁵⁶⁷⁸⁹) in ReportLab PDFs. The built in fonts do not include these glyphs, causing them to render as solid black boxes. Instead, use ReportLab's XML markup tags in Paragraph objects: For canvas drawn text (not Paragraph objects), manually adjust font the size and position rather than using Unicode subscripts/superscripts. Command Line Tools pdftotext (poppler utils) qpdf pdftk (if available) Common Tasks Extract Text from Scanned PDFs Add Watermark Extract Images Password Protection 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 pdf lib or pypdf (see forms.md) See forms.md Next Steps For advanced pypdfium2 usage, see reference.md For JavaScript libraries (pdf lib), see reference.md If you need to fill out a PDF form, follow the instructions in forms.md For troubleshooting guides, see reference.md This skill is created and maintained by [Anthropic](https://github.com/anthropics/skills/tree/main/skills/pdf). Vendored here unmodified except for frontmatter metadata and the case of the reference.md / forms.md links, which upstream writes uppercase; see LICENSE.txt for terms.