Agent skill · creative production · davila7
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, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable. If the user mentions a .pdf file or asks to produce one, use this skill.
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific Python scripts for PDF manipulation that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires pdfplumber, pypdf, reportlab installed locally. About 4k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 30,138 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
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.addpage(page) Split PDFs pypdf One page per file Extract text pdfplumber page.extracttext() Extract tables pdfplumber page.extracttables() 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
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills davila7/pdf-anthropic