PDF is the file format AI workflows get stuck on most — designed for print, not for machines. Anthropic's official PDF Skill fixes exactly that: it lets Claude Code and compatible agents read, write, edit, merge, split, fill, encrypt, and OCR PDFs the way a human would.
What it covers: the full PDF lifecycle
This skill handles nearly every high-frequency PDF operation:
Reading & extraction: pull text and tables from PDFs (pdfplumber gives precise table structure), read metadata (title/author/subject)
Merge & split: combine multiple PDFs into one, or split a file into single pages or page ranges
Page operations: rotate pages, add watermarks, reorder pages
Creation & forms: generate PDFs from scratch, fill PDF forms (the FORMS module handles form fields specifically)
Security: encrypt and decrypt PDFs to protect sensitive documents
OCR: recognize text in scans so unsearchable PDFs become searchable
Under the hood: Python ecosystem
The skill combines battle-tested Python libraries: pypdf for core read/write and page operations, pdfplumber for high-precision text/table extraction, and a Tesseract pipeline for OCR. The agent picks the right combination for each task automatically — no user intervention needed.
Typical use cases
Contract review: read a 50-page contract PDF, extract key clauses, dates, and amounts, and output a structured summary
Report assembly: merge weekly report PDFs into a monthly report, watermark it, and distribute
Form automation: batch-fill PDF forms (invoices, applications) to replace manual data entry
Scan digitization: OCR paper documents into searchable text and feed them into downstream pipelines
How to use & download
Claude Code users: drop the skills/pdf directory into your project's .claude/skills/ folder. Once enabled, just describe the task in natural language ("turn this PDF into text") and the agent handles the rest. Full source and usage notes: official GitHub repo.
Other agent users: the skill follows the standard SKILL.md convention (name/description metadata + operation guide), compatible with any toolchain that supports the Agent Skills standard. Official docs: Anthropic Agent Skills documentation.
Related resources
Combine it with the rest of the document-processing quartet: Word skill (docx), Excel skill (xlsx), and PowerPoint skill (pptx). For general-purpose document OCR, pair it with PaddleOCR.