What This Skill Does
Full PDF processing — read, create, merge, split, rotate, watermark, encrypt, fill forms, extract images, and OCR scanned documents. Uses Python tools (reportlab, pdfplumber, pypdf) with optional visual rendering via Poppler.
When to Use It
- Reading or extracting text and tables from PDFs
- Creating new PDF documents programmatically
- Merging multiple PDFs into one
- Splitting, rotating, or watermarking PDF pages
- Filling PDF forms
- OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable
- Extracting images from PDF documents
Key Tools
- pdfplumber — Text and table extraction with layout awareness
- reportlab — PDF creation with full formatting control
- pypdf — Merge, split, rotate, encrypt operations
- Poppler — Visual rendering for layout verification
Best Practices
- Verify extracted text against the visual layout (use rendering)
- Handle encoding issues gracefully — PDFs can have inconsistent text encoding
- Test form filling with the target PDF viewer
- Use OCR as a fallback when text extraction returns empty results