PDF Skill Purpose
Provides expertise in programmatic PDF generation, parsing, and manipulation. Specializes in creating PDFs from scratch, extracting content, merging/splitting documents, and handling forms using PDFKit, PDF.js, Puppeteer, and similar tools.
When to Use Generating PDFs programmatically Extracting text or data from PDFs Merging or splitting PDF documents Filling PDF forms programmatically Converting HTML to PDF Adding watermarks or annotations Parsing PDF structure and metadata Building PDF report generators Quick Start
Invoke this skill when:
Generating PDFs from code or data Extracting content from PDF files Merging, splitting, or manipulating PDFs Filling or creating PDF forms Converting HTML/web pages to PDF
Do NOT invoke when:
Word document creation → use /docx-skill Excel/spreadsheet work → use /xlsx-skill PowerPoint creation → use /pptx-skill General file operations → use Bash or file tools Decision Framework PDF Operation? ├── Generate from scratch │ ├── Simple → PDFKit (Node) / ReportLab (Python) │ └── Complex layouts → Puppeteer/Playwright + HTML ├── Parse/Extract │ ├── Text extraction → pdf-parse / PyPDF2 │ └── Table extraction → Camelot / Tabula ├── Manipulate │ └── pdf-lib (merge, split, edit) └── Forms └── pdf-lib (fill) / PDFtk (advanced)
Core Workflows 1. PDF Generation with PDFKit Install PDFKit (npm install pdfkit) Create new PDDocument Add content (text, images, graphics) Style with fonts and colors Add pages as needed Pipe to file or response 2. HTML to PDF Conversion Set up Puppeteer/Playwright Navigate to HTML content or URL Configure page size and margins Set print options (headers, footers) Generate PDF buffer Save or stream result 3. PDF Parsing and Extraction Choose parser (pdf-parse, PyPDF2, pdfplumber) Load PDF file Extract text or structured data Handle multi-page documents Clean and normalize extracted text Output in desired format Best Practices Use vector graphics over raster when possible Embed fonts for consistent rendering Test PDF output across different readers Handle large PDFs with streaming Use appropriate library for task complexity Consider accessibility (tagged PDFs) Anti-Patterns Anti-Pattern Problem Correct Approach Image-only PDFs Not searchable/accessible Use text with fonts No font embedding Rendering issues Embed required fonts Memory loading large PDFs Crashes Stream processing Ignoring encryption Security/access issues Handle encrypted PDFs Wrong tool for job Over-engineering Match tool to complexity