The PDF skill: merge, extract, fill and OCR in one place
PDFs resist editing: text arrives in fragments, tables lose their grid and form fields hide in the structure. The PDF skill hands the agent tested recipes built on pypdf, pdfplumber, reportlab, qpdf and pdftotext, and points to FORMS.md and REFERENCE.md for forms and harder cases.
Merges and splits documents, rotates pages, reads metadata and stamps a watermark on every page using pypdf.
Extracts layout-preserving text and tables with pdfplumber, and can stack tables from every page into one Excel file via pandas.
Generates new PDFs with reportlab, from a one-page canvas to a multi-page Platypus report, using <sub> and <super> tags for indices.
Makes scanned PDFs searchable by rendering pages with pdf2image and running pytesseract over each image.
Adds or removes passwords, pulls embedded images with pdfimages, and fills form fields by following FORMS.md.
When to use it
A contract arrives as a dozen separate scans that must become one PDF, with sideways pages turned upright.
A bank statement or annual report holds tables you need in Excel without retyping a single figure.
Someone sends a fillable PDF application and you want it completed from spreadsheet data or an email thread.
Ask your agent
Merge scan1.pdf, scan2.pdf and scan3.pdf into one file and rotate page 2 by 90 degrees
Pull every table out of report.pdf and save them to one Excel sheet
OCR the scanned invoice in invoice.pdf and write the text to invoice.txt
Questions
How do I install the PDF skill in Claude Code?
Use npx skills add anthropics/skills@pdf, or get it inside the document-skills plugin: /plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills, then /plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills.
Can the PDF skill fill in PDF forms?
Yes. SKILL.md hands form work to a separate FORMS.md file, which covers filling fields with pdf-lib or pypdf.
Is the PDF skill open source?
No. Anthropic's README calls the document skills source-available rather than open source, and the SKILL.md frontmatter marks the licence as proprietary.
