PDF Read Skill

Extract text and metadata from PDF files.

When to Use

✅ USE this skill when:

• User uploads a PDF and asks for summary
• Extract text from a PDF document
• Read PDF metadata (author, title, pages)
• Analyze PDF content

When NOT to Use

❌ DON'T use this skill when:

• Creating or generating PDFs → use reporting tools
• Editing existing PDFs → use PDF manipulation tools
• OCR on scanned images → use OCR/tesseract tools
• Password-protected PDFs → ask user to unlock first

Installation

cd /job
npm install pdf-parse

Usage

const fs = require('fs');
const pdf = require('pdf-parse');

async function readPDF(filePath) {
  const dataBuffer = fs.readFileSync(filePath);
  const data = await pdf(dataBuffer);
  
  return {
    text: data.text,
    pages: data.numpages,
    info: data.info, // metadata
    version: data.version,
    metadata: data.metadata
  };
}

// Example
const result = await readPDF('/path/to/document.pdf');
console.log(`Pages: ${result.pages}`);
console.log(`Text preview: ${result.text.substring(0, 500)}...`);

Extract Text by Page Range

const pdf = require('pdf-parse');
const fs = require('fs');

async function readPDFPages(filePath, startPage, endPage) {
  const dataBuffer = fs.readFileSync(filePath);
  const data = await pdf(dataBuffer, {
    max: endPage,
    version: 'v2.0.550',
    normalizeWhitespace: true,
  });
  
  return data.text;
}

Get Metadata

const result = await readPDF('/path/to/document.pdf');
console.log('Author:', result.info?.Author);
console.log('Title:', result.info?.Title);
console.log('Subject:', result.info?.Subject);
console.log('Keywords:', result.info?.Keywords);
console.log('Creator:', result.info?.Creator);
console.log('Producer:', result.info?.Producer);
console.log('Creation Date:', result.info?.CreationDate);
console.log('Mod Date:', result.info?.ModDate);

Search Text in PDF

async function searchInPDF(filePath, searchTerm) {
  const result = await readPDF(filePath);
  const text = result.text;
  const lines = text.split('\n');
  
  const matches = [];
  lines.forEach((line, index) => {
    if (line.toLowerCase().includes(searchTerm.toLowerCase())) {
      matches.push({
        line: index + 1,
        content: line.trim()
      });
    }
  });
  
  return {
    total_matches: matches.length,
    matches: matches.slice(0, 20) // limit results
  };
}

Extract All Text as Single String

async function extractFullText(filePath) {
  const result = await readPDF(filePath);
  // Normalize whitespace for cleaner output
  return result.text.replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
}

Handling Large PDFs

For PDFs with many pages, process in chunks:

async function readPDFFirstNPages(filePath, maxPages = 10) {
  const dataBuffer = fs.readFileSync(filePath);
  const data = await pdf(dataBuffer, { max: maxPages });
  
  return {
    text: data.text,
    total_pages: data.numpages,
    pages_read: Math.min(maxPages, data.numpages)
  };
}

Error Handling

async function safeReadPDF(filePath) {
  try {
    const result = await readPDF(filePath);
    return { success: true, ...result };
  } catch (error) {
    if (error.message.includes('password')) {
      return { success: false, error: 'PDF is password-protected' };
    }
    if (error.message.includes('parse')) {
      return { success: false, error: 'Invalid or corrupted PDF' };
    }
    return { success: false, error: error.message };
  }
}

Quick Response Template

"Read this PDF"

const result = await readPDF(filePath);
return `📄 **PDF Summary**

**Pages:** ${result.pages}
**Title:** ${result.info?.Title || 'N/A'}
**Author:** ${result.info?.Author || 'N/A'}

**Preview (first 500 chars):**
${result.text.substring(0, 500)}...
`;

Notes

• pdf-parse works on most standard PDFs
• Does NOT support OCR for scanned documents
• Does NOT handle password-protected PDFs
• For image-heavy PDFs, text extraction may be limited
• Large PDFs (>100 pages) should be read in chunks