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Claude skill · Documents · Anthropic

PDF skill for Claude

Anthropic’s skill for reading, creating and changing PDF files: text and table extraction, merging and splitting, forms, watermarks and OCR.

Command
/pdf
Licence
Proprietary: no copies, link only
Folder
12 files, 57 KB
Runs code
8 scripts

Overview

What it does

This is the skill behind Claude’s own PDF handling. Its SKILL.md is a working guide to the Python and command-line tools for the job: pypdf for merging, splitting and rotating pages, pdfplumber for text and tables, reportlab for new documents, and poppler and qpdf on the command line.

Form filling has its own reference file and eight helper scripts. They check whether a PDF has fillable fields, extract the field structure, fill the fields, and, for flat forms with no fields, place text by bounding box and render an image so Claude can check the result before handing it back.

Triggers

When Claude uses it

  • Any mention of a .pdf file, or a request to produce one.
  • Extracting text, tables or images; merging, splitting or rotating pages; watermarks; encryption.
  • Filling in a PDF form, or making a scanned PDF searchable with OCR.

What it needs

  • Python with pypdf, pdfplumber and reportlab; OCR also needs pytesseract and pdf2image.
  • Command-line tools such as poppler-utils and qpdf for some steps.
  • Proprietary licence: use it through Claude or the official plugin, and don’t copy it into your own projects.

Install

How to install it

Claude Code

Plugin (type in Claude Code)
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

The document-skills plugin installs 4 skills from this repository, including this one. Its skills are then namespaced, such as /document-skills:pdf.

Its licence doesn’t allow copies, so we don’t give a copy command. Install it with the plugin above.

claude.ai and the Claude API

Anthropic runs this skill for you. It’s built into claude.ai when code execution is on, and on the API you reference it as pdf:

Messages API request (excerpt)
{
  "container": {
    "skills": [
      {
        "type": "anthropic",
        "skill_id": "pdf",
        "version": "latest"
      }
    ]
  },
  "tools": [
    {
      "type": "code_execution_20250825",
      "name": "code_execution"
    }
  ]
}

Checks

SKILL.md validator results

Its SKILL.md (314 lines) run through our SKILL.md validator, with the folder’s file list, for both targets. These check the file’s format, not whether the skill works well.

Claude Code

0 errors, 0 warnings, 1 tip

  • tipSKILL.md doesn’t mention forms.md, reference.md, scripts/check_bounding_boxes.py, scripts/check_fillable_fields.py, scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py and 5 more. Say what each file is for and when to read or run it, or Claude won’t know to use it.

claude.ai and the API

0 errors, 0 warnings, 2 tips

  • tipThe Claude Help Center’s upload guide gives a 200-character description limit for claude.ai, though the platform docs say 1,024. Keep it under 200 if you’ll upload it there.
  • tipSKILL.md doesn’t mention forms.md, reference.md, scripts/check_bounding_boxes.py, scripts/check_fillable_fields.py, scripts/convert_pdf_to_images.py and 5 more. Say what each file is for and when to read or run it, or Claude won’t know to use it.

Folder

What’s in the folder

  • forms.md12 KB
  • LICENSE.txt1.4 KB
  • reference.md16 KB
  • SKILL.md7.9 KB
  • scripts/8 files, 20 KB

Source

Licence and source

Related

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