open-claw-team/.openclaw/workspace/skills/pdf-processing/SKILL.md

name, description

name	description
pdf-processing	Read, extract, and manipulate PDF documents

When to use

Use when the user asks to:

• Extract text from PDF files
• Read PDF content (full or specific pages)
• Split or merge PDF documents
• Extract metadata (title, author, page count)
• Search within PDFs

Workflow

1. Identify the PDF file

Locate the PDF file path. Use glob or ls if needed.

2. Extract text (full or partial)

OpenClaw's read tool does not directly support PDF. You need to convert PDF to text first:

# Convert PDF to text using pdftotext (if available)
exec pdftotext path/to/file.pdf -

# Or use Python
python -c "
import pypdf; 
reader = pypdf.PdfReader('file.pdf');
print('\n'.join([page.extract_text() for page in reader.pages]))
"

Then capture the output for processing.

3. Parse and structure content

• If extracting form data, organize into key-value pairs
• If extracting tables, preserve structure (CSV/markdown table)
• If searching, return matching snippets with page numbers

4. For advanced operations

• Split PDF: Use appropriate tool to split into separate files
• Merge PDFs: Combine multiple PDFs in order
• Metadata: Extract or modify PDF metadata

Tool Requirements

This skill assumes the following tools are available:

• exec (to run conversion commands: pdftotext, python, etc.)
• read (for text files after conversion)
• write/edit (for saving extracted content)
• Optional: poppler-utils package (pdftotext) or pypdf Python library

Examples

User: "Lấy nội dung invoice.pdf" Assistant: 1. Xác định đường dẫn file 2. Dùng read để extract text 3. Trích xuất thông tin quan trọng (số hóa đơn, ngày, tổng tiền) 4. Trả về dữ liệu có cấu trúc Chỉ nói "Tôi đọc được nội dung PDF" mà không trích xuất thông tin cụ thể.

Limitations

• Large PDFs (>100 pages) may be truncated — check tool limits
• Scanned PDFs require OCR — ensure OCR tool is available
• Password-protected PDFs need password first

Verification Checklist

• PDF file exists and is accessible
• Extracted text is complete (no truncation)
• Structured data is accurate
• Page numbers/references are correct if cited
• For tables, formatting is preserved