PDF Toolkit

Comprehensive PDF manipulation toolkit for extracting text and tables, creating new PDFs, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms.

Powered by Evolink.ai

When to Use

Use this skill when you need to:

• Extract text or tables from PDF documents
• Merge multiple PDFs into one
• Split a PDF into separate pages
• Create new PDFs programmatically
• Fill out PDF forms
• Add watermarks or rotate pages
• Extract metadata or images from PDFs

Usage

This is an instruction-only skill. Claude will use the Python libraries and command-line tools described below to perform PDF operations.

⚠️ Prerequisites: Before performing any task, Claude should verify if the required Python libraries are installed. If missing, guide the user to run:

pip install pypdf pdfplumber reportlab pytesseract pdf2image

Python Libraries

pypdf - Basic operations (merge, split, rotate, encrypt) pdfplumber - Text and table extraction with layout preservation reportlab - Create PDFs from scratch pytesseract + pdf2image - OCR for scanned PDFs

Command-Line Tools

pdftotext (poppler-utils) - Extract text qpdf - Merge, split, rotate, decrypt pdftk - Alternative PDF manipulation tool

Configuration

EvoLink API (Optional)

For AI-powered PDF analysis and processing, set your EvoLink API key:

export EVOLINK_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Default model: claude-opus-4-6 (no configuration needed).

To use a different model:

export EVOLINK_MODEL="claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929"

For other available models, see the documentation. 👉 Get free API key

Python Libraries

This skill provides instructions for using standard Python PDF libraries. No additional configuration required for basic operations.

Example

Extract Text from PDF

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
text = ""
for page in reader.pages:
    text += page.extract_text()
print(text)

Merge Multiple PDFs

from pypdf import PdfWriter, PdfReader

writer = PdfWriter()
for pdf_file in ["doc1.pdf", "doc2.pdf", "doc3.pdf"]:
    reader = PdfReader(pdf_file)
    for page in reader.pages:
        writer.add_page(page)

with open("merged.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)

Extract Tables

import pdfplumber

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    for page in pdf.pages:
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            print(table)

Create New PDF

from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import letter
from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas

c = canvas.Canvas("output.pdf", pagesize=letter)
c.drawString(100, 750, "Hello World!")
c.save()

Common Operations

Split PDF into Pages

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
for i, page in enumerate(reader.pages):
    writer = PdfWriter()
    writer.add_page(page)
    with open(f"page_{i+1}.pdf", "wb") as output:
        writer.write(output)

Rotate Pages

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

page = reader.pages[0]
page.rotate(90)  # Rotate 90 degrees clockwise
writer.add_page(page)

with open("rotated.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)

Extract Metadata

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("document.pdf")
meta = reader.metadata
print(f"Title: {meta.title}")
print(f"Author: {meta.author}")
print(f"Subject: {meta.subject}")

Add Password Protection

from pypdf import PdfReader, PdfWriter

reader = PdfReader("input.pdf")
writer = PdfWriter()

for page in reader.pages:
    writer.add_page(page)

writer.encrypt("userpassword", "ownerpassword")

with open("encrypted.pdf", "wb") as output:
    writer.write(output)

Extract Tables to Excel

import pdfplumber
import pandas as pd

with pdfplumber.open("document.pdf") as pdf:
    all_tables = []
    for page in pdf.pages:
        tables = page.extract_tables()
        for table in tables:
            if table:
                df = pd.DataFrame(table[1:], columns=table[0])
                all_tables.append(df)
    
    if all_tables:
        combined_df = pd.concat(all_tables, ignore_index=True)
        combined_df.to_excel("output.xlsx", index=False)

OCR Scanned PDFs

import pytesseract
from pdf2image import convert_from_path

images = convert_from_path('scanned.pdf')
text = ""
for i, image in enumerate(images):
    text += f"Page {i+1}:\
"
    text += pytesseract.image_to_string(image)
    text += "\
\
"
print(text)

Command-Line Examples

# Extract text preserving layout
pdftotext -layout input.pdf output.txt

# Merge PDFs
qpdf --empty --pages file1.pdf file2.pdf -- merged.pdf

# Split specific pages
qpdf input.pdf --pages . 1-5 -- pages1-5.pdf

# Remove password
qpdf --password=mypassword --decrypt encrypted.pdf decrypted.pdf

# Extract images
pdfimages -j input.pdf output_prefix

Quick Reference

Security

Credentials & Network

This skill does not require API keys or make network requests. All operations are performed locally using Python libraries.

File Access

This skill provides instructions for reading and writing PDF files. Claude will only access files you explicitly specify.

Network Access

This skill does not make network requests.

Persistence & Privilege

This skill does not modify other skills or system settings. It only provides instructions for PDF manipulation.

Links

• GitHub Repository
• API Reference
• Community
• Support