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PDF Extraction Skill by @claude-office-skills

FREE

github stars★ 546updatedJan 2026repo@claude-office-skills

$git clone https://github.com/claude-office-skills/skills

The skill is the pdf-extraction folder inside that repository. Copy it into the folder your agent loads skills from; check your agent's documentation for where that is.

about PDF Extraction Skill by @claude-office-skills

Extract text, tables, and metadata from PDFs using pdfplumber.

our take

Extracts text, tables and metadata from PDFs using the pdfplumber library, with notes on how PDFs are structured and how to use the library's fundamentals.

when to use it

You need tables pulled out of PDF reports
You process many PDFs with a script
You want to understand why extraction misbehaves on some files

before you install

Scanned PDFs need OCR first, since pdfplumber reads text layers only
Check extracted tables against the original for merged cells and shifted columns

what's inside

The original SKILL.md is organised into these sections:

Overview
How to Use
Domain Knowledge
pdfplumber Fundamentals
PDF Structure
Text Extraction
Table Extraction
Visual Debugging
Cropping and Filtering
Metadata and Structure
Best Practices
Common Patterns

source and license

Written and maintained by @claude-office-skills. It is published under the MIT license, which allows reuse with attribution. SkillDirectory does not claim authorship: this page adds our own review and links back to the original, and the skill's text belongs to its author.

View the full SKILL.md on GitHub ↗

Read the opening of the original SKILL.md

# PDF Extraction Skill

## Overview

This skill enables precise extraction of text, tables, and metadata from PDF documents using **pdfplumber** - the go-to library for PDF data extraction. Unlike basic PDF readers, pdfplumber provides detailed character-level positioning, accurate table detection, and visual debugging.

## How to Use

1. Provide the PDF file you want to extract from
2. Specify what you need: text, tables, images, or metadata
3. I'll generate pdfplumber code and execute it

**Example prompts:**
- "Extract all tables from this financial report"
- "Get text from pages 5-10 of this document"
- "Find and extract the invoice total from this PDF"
- "Convert this PDF table to CSV/Excel"

## Domain Knowledge

### pdfplumber Fundamentals

```python
import pdfplumber

# Open PDF
with pdfplumber.open('document.pdf') as pdf:
    # Access pages
    first_page = pdf.pages[0]
    
    # Document metadata
    print(pdf.metadata)
    
    # Number of pages
    print(len(pdf.pages))
…

Excerpt only, quoted from the author's repository. Open the repository for the complete file.

↓ download .zip