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pdf

Extract text and tables, create, merge, split, and fill PDF documents programmatically.

Updated Jun 18, 2026
Search Tags:#ocr#document processing#pdf#form filling#pdfplumber#pypdf#table extraction
One-click install
npx skills add https://github.com/svpfahad/RES200 --skill pdf-svpfahad
Or copy as Structured Prompt for Agent▼
Please help me install this Agent Skill.
Skill: pdf
Source: https://github.com/svpfahad/RES200/tree/main/claude-scientific-writer-main/.claude/skills/document-skills/pdf
Command: npx skills add https://github.com/svpfahad/RES200 --skill pdf-svpfahad

SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION & REQUIREMENTS

💡 This Skill requires pypdf, pdf2image, Pillow, and includes scripts (resource) and references (resource) components.

What problem does it solve? Working with PDF files programmatically is fragmented across many libraries and command-line tools, and tasks like extracting tables, merging documents, or filling forms each require different approaches and syntax that are hard to remember. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Text and Table Extraction: Pull text with layout preservation and structured tables from PDFs using pdfplumber, pypdf, or pdftotext, with OCR support for scanned documents. - PDF Creation and Manipulation: Create PDFs with reportlab, merge and split files with pypdf or qpdf, rotate pages, add watermarks, and manage password protection. - Form Filling: Fill both fillable PDF forms (via field extraction scripts) and non-fillable forms (via visual bounding-box analysis and text annotations) using guided scripts. - Use Case: Given a stack of non-fillable PDF application forms, convert pages to images, identify field bounding boxes, validate them, and produce completed PDFs with text annotations. ## Quick Start Use the pdf skill to extract all tables from the attached report.pdf and save them to an Excel file.

Frequently Asked Questions about pdf

High-intent search queries and answers about installing and using this skill.

FAQPage Schema
How do I extract tables from a PDF in Python?▼

Use pdfplumber's page.extract_tables() method to detect and extract tables from each PDF page. The results can be loaded into pandas DataFrames and exported to Excel or CSV for further analysis.

How do I fill a PDF form that has no fillable fields?▼

Convert the PDF pages to PNG images, visually identify field locations, and define entry bounding boxes in a fields.json file. Then validate the boxes with check_bounding_boxes.py and apply text annotations using fill_pdf_form_with_annotations.py.

What is the difference between pypdf and pdfplumber?▼

pypdf handles structural operations like merging, splitting, rotating, metadata, and encryption. pdfplumber specializes in content extraction, providing text with layout coordinates and table detection.

Can I extract text from a scanned PDF?▼

Scanned PDFs contain images rather than text layers, so standard extraction fails. Convert pages to images with pdf2image and run OCR with pytesseract to recover the text content.

How do I merge or split PDFs from the command line?▼

Use qpdf with the --empty --pages syntax to merge multiple files or extract page ranges. The pdftk tool offers similar cat and burst operations when available on the system.

Why does my filled PDF form not display values in some viewers?▼

Some viewers require the NeedAppearances flag to render form values correctly. The fill_fillable_fields.py script sets this flag via set_need_appearances_writer, though viewers may then prompt to save changes.

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