PDF (Claude Skill)

Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files.


Type	Claude Skill
Supplier	K-Dense Inc. (community OSS)
Availability	GA — part of the actively maintained K-Dense `scientific-agent-skills` collection
Pricing	Free / OSS (Proprietary..txt has complete terms)
Capabilities	Read/Write — Claude runs the skill’s Python locally (Bash), not as an MCP tool

How to install

Claude Code / Claude.ai — Skills CLI (recommended):
```
npx skills add K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
```
Installs the K-Dense collection; enable the pdf skill when prompted. Works across Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex via the Agent Skills spec (requires Node ≥ 18).
Claude Code / Claude Desktop — manual clone:
```
git clone https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills
cp -r scientific-agent-skills/skills/pdf ~/.claude/skills/
```
Project-scoped alternative: copy into .claude/skills/ instead of ~/.claude/skills/. The skill declares its own Python dependencies in its SKILL.md; install them (the K-Dense skills generally use uv / pip) when prompted on first use.

What it does

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.

Primary use cases: Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files.

Notes

Distributed as a SKILL.md (plus code examples) in the K-Dense collection — Claude executes it locally via Bash/Python rather than as an MCP server. Upstream license: Proprietary..txt has complete terms. The skill name to enable after install is pdf.

Sources

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