Agent Skill
PDF skill
pdfAnthropic Skillsskills/pdf/SKILL.md
Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or extracting text/tables from PDFs, combining or merging multiple PDFs into one, splitting PDFs apart, rotating pages, adding watermarks, creating new PDFs, filling PDF forms, encrypting/decrypting PDFs, extracting images, and OCR on scanned PDFs to make them searchable. If the user mentions a .pdf file or asks to produce one, use this skill.
always on
92 tokname + description
once used
1,972 tokSKILL.md body
bundled files
118 scripts
installs
215kskills.sh
Install the PDF skill
Skills CLI (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and others)
npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill pdf
Claude Code, by hand (all projects)
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/anthropics/skills.git /tmp/skills mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills cp -R /tmp/skills/skills/pdf ~/.claude/skills/pdf
For one project only, copy the folder into .claude/skills/ in that project instead. The agent picks it up when a task matches its description.
What it costs your context
Agent Skills load in three steps. Tokens counted with the o200k tokenizer; your model's count will differ a little.
| When | What loads | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Every session | Name and description | 92 tok |
| When the agent uses it | The SKILL.md instructions | 1,972 tok |
| Only if opened | 11 bundled files (49 KB) | varies |
Until it is used, pdf costs about 15× less than the median MCP server we measured (1,362 tokens on every turn). Installing all 20 skills from anthropics/skills would load 2,065 tokens of descriptions. Skills vs MCP study
Checks
- Ships scripts the agent can run. Read them before installing.
Checked 2026-10-22 · method
What's inside
The headings of its SKILL.md. Read the full file on GitHub.
- PDF Processing Guide
- Overview
- Quick Start
- Python Libraries
- pypdf - Basic Operations
- pdfplumber - Text and Table Extraction
- reportlab - Create PDFs
- Command-Line Tools
- pdftotext (poppler-utils)
- qpdf
- pdftk (if available)
- Common Tasks
- Extract Text from Scanned PDFs
- Add Watermark
- Extract Images
- Password Protection
- Quick Reference
- Next Steps
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