ReddRadar
Agent skill
processing-pdfs
Reads, creates, merges, splits, and edits PDF files, including text and table extraction, form filling, OCR on scanned documents, and watermarking. Activates when the user works with .pdf files or requests any PDF manipulation task.
Install this agent skill to your Project
npx add-skill https://github.com/jawhnycooke/claude-plugins/tree/main/plugins/ms-office-suite/skills/pdf
SKILL.md
PDF Processing Guide
This guide covers essential PDF operations using Python libraries and command-line tools. For advanced features and JavaScript libraries, see reference.md. For PDF form completion, see forms.md.
Quick Reference
| Task | Tool | Command/Method |
|---|---|---|
| Read text | pdfplumber | page.extract_text() |
| Extract tables | pdfplumber | page.extract_tables() |
| Merge PDFs | pypdf | PdfMerger().append() |
| Split pages | pypdf | PdfWriter().add_page() |
| Create PDF | reportlab | canvas.Canvas() |
| Text extraction (CLI) | pdftotext | pdftotext -layout file.pdf |
| Merge/split (CLI) | qpdf | qpdf --pages |
| OCR scanned docs | pytesseract | image_to_string() |
Reading PDFs
Extract Text with pdfplumber
import pdfplumber
with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
for page in pdf.pages:
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)
Extract Tables to Excel
import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd
with pdfplumber.open("report.pdf") as pdf:
tables = []
for page in pdf.pages:
page_tables = page.extract_tables()
for table in page_tables:
df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
tables.append(df)
# Export to Excel
with pd.ExcelWriter("output.xlsx") as writer:
for i, df in enumerate(tables):
df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name=f"Table_{i+1}", index=False)
Get PDF Metadata
from pypdf import PdfReader
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
info = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {info.title}")
print(f"Author: {info.author}")
print(f"Pages: {len(reader.pages)}")
Creating PDFs
Simple PDF with reportlab
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.setFont("Helvetica", 12)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello, World!")
c.save()
Multi-page Document with Platypus
from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.platypus import SimpleDocTemplate, Paragraph, Spacer
from reportlab.lib.styles import getSampleStyleSheet
doc = SimpleDocTemplate("report.pdf", pagesize=letter)
styles = getSampleStyleSheet()
story = []
story.append(Paragraph("Report Title", styles['Heading1']))
story.append(Spacer(1, 12))
story.append(Paragraph("This is the body text.", styles['Normal']))
doc.build(story)
Merging and Splitting
Merge Multiple PDFs
from pypdf import PdfMerger
merger = PdfMerger()
merger.append("file1.pdf")
merger.append("file2.pdf")
merger.append("file3.pdf")
merger.write("merged.pdf")
merger.close()
Split PDF into Pages
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages):
writer = PdfWriter()
writer.add_page(page)
writer.write(f"page_{i+1}.pdf")
Extract Page Range
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
# Extract pages 5-10 (0-indexed)
for page_num in range(4, 10):
writer.add_page(reader.pages[page_num])
writer.write("extracted.pdf")
Command-Line Tools
pdftotext (from poppler-utils)
# Extract text with layout preservation
pdftotext -layout document.pdf output.txt
# Extract specific pages
pdftotext -f 1 -l 5 document.pdf output.txt
# Output to stdout
pdftotext document.pdf -
qpdf
# Merge PDFs
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf
# Extract pages 1-5
qpdf document.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- extracted.pdf
# Rotate pages
qpdf document.pdf --rotate=90:1-5 rotated.pdf
# Remove password
qpdf --password=secret --decrypt protected.pdf unlocked.pdf
pdftk (alternative)
# Merge
pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf cat output merged.pdf
# Split
pdftk document.pdf burst output page_%d.pdf
# Rotate
pdftk document.pdf cat 1-5east output rotated.pdf
Advanced Operations
OCR Scanned Documents
from pdf2image import convert_from_path
import pytesseract
# Convert PDF pages to images
images = convert_from_path("scanned.pdf", dpi=300)
# OCR each page
text = ""
for image in images:
text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
print(text)
Add Watermark
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
watermark = PdfReader("watermark.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
page.merge_page(watermark.pages[0])
writer.add_page(page)
writer.write("watermarked.pdf")
Extract Images
# Using pdfimages (from poppler-utils)
pdfimages -png document.pdf images/
Password Protection
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()
for page in reader.pages:
writer.add_page(page)
writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")
writer.write("protected.pdf")
Dependencies
Install required packages:
# Python libraries
pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab pdf2image pytesseract pandas openpyxl
# System tools (macOS)
brew install poppler tesseract qpdf
# System tools (Ubuntu/Debian)
apt-get install poppler-utils tesseract-ocr qpdf
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