pdflisted

Read, create and manipulate PDF files — extract text and tables, merge, split, rotate, reorder and delete pages, read and fill AcroForm fields, add or strip metadata, encrypt and decrypt, and generate new PDFs from HTML or from scratch. Also covers rasterising pages to images so a PDF can actually be looked at, and OCR for scanned documents. Use whenever a .pdf must be produced, inspected or altered.
smith-network-solutions/threadknot · ★ 5 · Data & Documents · score 77

Install: claude install-skill smith-network-solutions/threadknot

# PDF files Which tool depends on the verb: | Task | Tool | | --- | --- | | Rearrange pages, merge, split, rotate, encrypt, metadata, forms | **pypdf** (`scripts/pdftool.py`) | | Extract text, and especially **tables** | **pdfplumber** (`scripts/extract.py`) | | Make a PDF from HTML/CSS | **WeasyPrint**, or LibreOffice for an Office source | | Make a PDF programmatically (precise placement) | **reportlab** | | Look at a page | rasterise — `scripts/extract.py --png` | Avoid **PyMuPDF/fitz**. It is widely recommended and technically excellent, but it is AGPL-3.0 or paid-commercial, which quietly infects whatever it touches. Everything above is MIT or BSD. ## Inspect before you act scripts/pdftool.py info report.pdf Page count, per-page size and rotation, metadata, encryption status, whether it has form fields, and whether the pages carry extractable text or are scanned images. **The last one decides your whole approach** — no text extractor will get anything out of a scan, and the answer is OCR, not a different library. ## Extracting text and tables scripts/extract.py report.pdf # all text scripts/extract.py report.pdf --pages 1-3 # a range scripts/extract.py report.pdf --tables # tables as CSV scripts/extract.py report.pdf --layout # preserve visual columns `--tables` uses pdfplumber's ruling-line detection, which works well on tables that have visible borders and poorly on those laid out with white