Agent skill · personamanagmentlayer
document-processing-expert
Read, generate and modify office documents and PDFs from code: PDF extraction and forms, Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint decks. Use when the user mentions PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, Word, Excel, PowerPoint or spreadsheets, wants data extracted from documents, needs a report or invoice generated as a file, must fill a form, or when the task involves parsing scanned documents, merging or splitting files, or producing a document a person will open.
What it needs
About 5k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Document Processing Expert Working with the formats people actually exchange. The recurring mistake is treating a document as text: these are structured containers, and the structure is where the meaning lives. Core Concepts Read the Format, Not the Bytes .docx, .xlsx and .pptx are ZIP archives of XML parts. PDF is a page description language, not a document model. Using a library that understands the format is not a convenience — string manipulation on these files produces output that opens corrupted. Extraction Is Lossy; Decide What Matters Every extraction discards something: layout, styling, reading order, or the relationship between a heading and its table. Decide up front whether you need text, structure, or fidelity, and choose the tool accordingly. Generation Is About Templates Building a document element by element in code produces unmaintainable output that a designer cannot touch. Fill a template that a human authored, in the tool they authored it in. Untrusted Documents Are Untrusted Input Documents carry macros, external entities, embedded files and remote references. A parsing library is an attack surface. Treat every uploaded document as hostile. PDF Extracting text pdfplumber preserves layout well and extracts tables; pypdf is faster for plain text and page manipulation. If extracttext() returns empty on a page that clearly has content, the page is an image — you need OCR, not a different parser. Extracting tables Table extraction is unreliable on borderless or multi-page tables. Validate the result — column count, expected types, totals that reconcile — rather than trusting it. Manipulating pages Note that removing a page does not remove content another page references, and redacting by drawing a black rectangle leaves the text underneath fully extractable. Real redaction removes the content stream — use a tool that does. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills personamanagmentlayer/document-processing-expert