PDF & Document Extraction

For DOCX: see the docx skill (create/edit) or use python-docx for structured reads. For PPTX: see the powerpoint skill (full create/read/edit support). For PDF manipulation (merge, split, forms, watermarks, creation): see the pdf skill. This skill covers text extraction from PDFs and scanned documents.

Coming from a read_file EXTRACTION COVERAGE WARNING? read_file auto-converts local PDFs but reads the text layer only; the warning footer lists the pages that yielded no text (scanned images). For a handful of pages, render + vision is fastest: pdftoppm -jpeg -r 150 -f N -l N file.pdf /tmp/page then vision_analyze each image. For bulk OCR of many pages, use marker-pdf below (Step 2).

Step 1: Remote URL Available?

If the document has a URL, always try web_extract first:

web_extract(urls=["https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03300"])
web_extract(urls=["https://example.com/report.pdf"])

This handles PDF-to-markdown conversion via Firecrawl with no local dependencies.