pdf

Manipulate PDF files — extract text, count pages, render thumbnails, merge or split documents. Use for PDF-specific operations that don't fit `markdown-converter` (general read) or `pandic-office` (write from markdown).

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pdf — PDF manipulation toolkit

The gateway image ships:

pdftotext, pdftoppm, pdfinfo from poppler-utils (apt)
pypdf (Python) for programmatic merge / split / metadata edits

Common operations

Extract text from a PDF

pdftotext /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.txt
# Or stream to stdout:
pdftotext /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf -

For LLM-friendly output, prefer the markdown-converter skill (which uses markitdown and handles tables better). Use pdftotext only when you need raw text quickly.

Count pages

pdfinfo /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf | grep Pages

Render a page to PNG (preview / OCR input)

# All pages → PNG at 150dpi
pdftoppm -png -r 150 /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/page

# Just page 1
pdftoppm -png -r 150 -f 1 -l 1 /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf /workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/cover

Merge multiple PDFs

python3 - <<'PY'
from pypdf import PdfWriter
w = PdfWriter()
for f in ["a.pdf", "b.pdf", "c.pdf"]:
    w.append(f)
w.write("/workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/merged.pdf")
PY

Split a PDF into per-page files

python3 - <<'PY'
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
r = PdfReader("/workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(r.pages):
    w = PdfWriter()
    w.add_page(page)
    w.write(f"/workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/page_{i+1}.pdf")
PY

Edit PDF metadata

python3 - <<'PY'
from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter
r = PdfReader("/workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/input.pdf")
w = PdfWriter(clone_from=r)
w.add_metadata({"/Title": "New Title", "/Author": "Theo"})
w.write("/workspace/$(basename "$PWD")/output.pdf")
PY

When NOT to use this skill

To read a PDF for context — use markdown-converter (cleaner output).
To create a PDF from markdown — use pandic-office (pandoc).
To create or edit Office docs (DOCX/XLSX/PPTX) — use officecli.

Repository: Team-Commonly/commonly
Path: backend/commonly-bundled-skills/pdf/SKILL.md
Commit: 69b6005

Last updated: about 18 hours ago
First committed: 3 months ago

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