PDF Processing

Announce at start: "I'm using the pdf skill to process PDF documents."

Quick Start

Basic operations available through pdf_operations.py:

from pdf_operations import (
    read_pdf,
    extract_metadata,
    extract_text,
    merge_pdfs,
    split_pdf
)

# Read PDF
reader = read_pdf("document.pdf")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")

# Extract text
text = extract_text("document.pdf")
text_page_1 = extract_text("document.pdf", page_number=1)

# Extract metadata
metadata = extract_metadata("document.pdf")
print(f"Title: {metadata['title']}")

# Merge PDFs
merge_pdfs(["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf"], "merged.pdf")

# Split PDF into individual pages
split_pdf("document.pdf", "output_dir/")

Form Filling

Check if PDF has fillable fields:

python scripts/check_fillable_fields.py document.pdf

For fillable forms:

1. Extract field info: python scripts/extract_form_field_info.py input.pdf fields.json
2. Create field values JSON
3. Fill form: python scripts/fill_fillable_fields.py input.pdf values.json output.pdf

For non-fillable forms, see forms.md for complete workflow.

Advanced Operations

Text and Table Extraction

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        # Extract text
        text = page.extract_text()

        # Extract tables
        tables = page.extract_tables()

PDF Creation

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello World!")
c.save()

Command-Line Tools

Convert PDF to images:

python scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py document.pdf output_dir/

Error Handling

All operations raise PDFOperationError for:

• File not found
• Invalid page numbers
• Empty merge lists
• Invalid output directories
• Corrupted PDFs

Dependencies

• pypdf - PDF reading/writing/merging
• pdfplumber - Text and table extraction
• reportlab - PDF creation
• pdf2image - Convert PDFs to images
• poppler-utils (system) - Image conversion backend

Documentation

• forms.md - Complete form filling workflow
• reference.md - Advanced features and troubleshooting
• examples.md - Usage examples
• README.md - Installation and setup