What problem does it solve?
This Skill solves the problem of needing to read and extract information from PDFs whose content is not already available in your chat context, including text-heavy documents, scanned documents, slide-decks, tables, embedded images, attachments, and form fields.
Core Features & Use Cases
- PDF content inventory & diagnostics: Identify page counts, metadata, whether text is extractable, embedded images, embedded files/attachments, and font encoding issues.
- Text and layout-aware extraction: Extract text using tools like pypdf and pdftotext (layout mode) and pdfplumber for positioning-oriented extraction and tables.
- Visual inspection via rasterization: Convert specific pages to images with pdftoppm for cases where charts, diagrams, equations, complex layout, or scans require visual understanding.
- Embedded content extraction: Extract raster images with pdfimages, extract attachments with pdfdetach, and read interactive form field values with pypdf.
- Decision guidance for the right strategy: Choose among text extraction, rasterization, and OCR fallback (for scanned PDFs) to match the document type and the question asked.
Quick Start
Ask the AI to inspect and extract the key fields from an attached PDF by first running a content inventory, then extracting readable text (and tables if present), and rasterizing only the necessary pages for any figures or garbled text.
