PDF Agent

Summary

• Use pdfagent to perform PDF operations (merge, split, compress, convert, OCR, etc.) with detailed usage metering in the output.
• Best for local, self-hosted processing where inputs/outputs must stay on disk.
• This skill ships source code in pdfagent/ and runs via uv run from scripts/pdfagent_cli.py (no PyPI publish required).

Requirements

• uv installed and on PATH.
• System tools as needed by specific commands: qpdf, ghostscript, poppler (pdftoppm), libreoffice, chromium (for HTML -> PDF), and ocrmypdf.

Core Usage

• Merge PDFs with usage metrics: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py merge file1.pdf file2.pdf --out merged.pdf --json
• Split a PDF by ranges: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py split input.pdf --range "1-3,5" --out-dir out_dir --json
• Compress a PDF with a preset: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py compress input.pdf --preset ebook --out compressed.pdf --json
• Convert images to PDF: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py jpg-to-pdf image1.jpg image2.png --out output.pdf --json
• OCR a scanned PDF: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py ocr scan.pdf --lang eng --out scan_ocr.pdf --json
• Agent mode for multi-step instructions: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py agent "merge then rotate 90 degrees every other page" -i file1.pdf -i file2.pdf --out out.pdf --json
• Dependency/binary check: uv run {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py doctor --json

Notes

• Use --json for machine-readable outputs (includes usage and outputs).
• For encrypted PDFs, pass --password or per-file --passwords.
• If a conversion tool is missing, pdfagent may use a fallback path and will note it in output or logs.
• Optional Python deps are still command-specific: uv run --with pdf2docx --with camelot-py[cv] --with pdfplumber --with pyhanko {baseDir}/scripts/pdfagent_cli.py <command> ...