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PDF Toolkit

Official

Official Anthropic skill for reading, merging, splitting, extracting tables, OCR-ing, and creating PDF files.

Docs & OfficeBeginner★ 167,132⑂ 19,920AI score 9/10Last updated: Aug 7, 2026

What it does

Gives Claude a practical playbook for virtually any PDF task:

  • Read & extract: layout-preserving text with pdfplumber, tables straight into pandas DataFrames or Excel
  • Edit: merge, split, rotate, and watermark using pypdf, qpdf, or pdftk
  • Create: build multi-page reports with reportlab Canvas or Platypus (includes the gotcha about Unicode sub/superscripts rendering as black boxes — use <sub>/<super> tags instead)
  • Secure: set user/owner passwords, decrypt with qpdf --decrypt
  • OCR scans: pdf2image + pytesseract to make scanned PDFs searchable
  • Forms: defers to FORMS.md, with REFERENCE.md for pdfpdfium2, pdf-lib, and troubleshooting

Who it's for

  • Office and finance staff handling contracts, invoices, and statements
  • Analysts pulling numbers out of scanned documents
  • Developers automating PDF report generation
  • Python beginners unsure which PDF library to reach for

Examples

  1. "Merge these three quarterly reports and stamp a watermark on every page" → pypdf merge plus merge_page.
  2. "Pull the amounts table out of this scanned invoice into Excel" → pytesseract OCR, pdfplumber table extraction, pandas to_excel.
  3. "Generate a monthly report PDF with a title page and two content pages" → reportlab Platypus with Title, Heading1, and PageBreak.

· · · Install guide · · ·

Install in the Claude app (no terminal)
  1. Download the ZIP with the button below.
  2. In Claude, open Settings → Capabilities and turn on 'Code execution and file creation'. (one time)
  3. Go to Customize → Skills → + → 'Upload a skill' and upload the ZIP.
↓ Download ZIP
Install in Claude Code

Let Claude do it — paste this into Claude Code

Install the skill I found on Claude Skill Mart.
Copy the skills/pdf folder from the GitHub repo anthropics/skills into my ~/.claude/skills/pdf/.
When it's done, tell me in one line what this skill can do.

Install with a command instead

git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git /tmp/anthropic-skills && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r /tmp/anthropic-skills/skills/pdf ~/.claude/skills/pdf

⚠ This is a third-party skill. Check the source repository before installing.

  1. Open a terminal.
  2. Clone the repo: git clone https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git
  3. Create the skills directory: mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
  4. Copy the skill: cp -r skills/skills/pdf ~/.claude/skills/pdf
  5. Install Python deps: pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab pandas openpyxl pytesseract pdf2image
  6. Install CLI tools (macOS: brew install poppler qpdf tesseract; Ubuntu: sudo apt install poppler-utils qpdf tesseract-ocr).
  7. Restart Claude Code and try a prompt like "extract the tables from this PDF" — the skill activates automatically.
View source on GitHub ↗