Pdf Reading

PDF Reading Skill

This skill helps agents extract information from PDF documents.

Tools Available

The environment has these PDF tools pre-installed:

• pdfplumber - Python library for precise text/table extraction
• PyPDF2 - Python library for PDF manipulation
• pdftotext - Command-line tool from poppler-utils

Quick Extraction

Command Line (Fast)

# Extract all text from a PDF
pdftotext /root/artifacts/paper.pdf -

# Extract specific pages
pdftotext -f 1 -l 3 /root/artifacts/paper.pdf -

# Extract to a file
pdftotext /root/artifacts/paper.pdf /tmp/paper.txt

Python (More Control)

import pdfplumber
from pathlib import Path

def extract_pdf_text(pdf_path: str) -> str:
    """Extract all text from a PDF file."""
    text_parts = []
    with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
        for page in pdf.pages:
            text = page.extract_text()
            if text:
                text_parts.append(text)
    return "\n\n".join(text_parts)

# Usage
text = extract_pdf_text("/root/artifacts/paper.pdf")
print(text)

Extracting Specific Information

Find Commands in Text

import re

def find_commands(text: str) -> list:
    """Extract shell commands from text."""
    # Look for common command patterns
    patterns = [
        r'docker run[^\n]+',
        r'\$[^\n]+',
        r'--package=[^\s]+\s+--version=[^\s]+',
    ]
    commands = []
    for pattern in patterns:
        commands.extend(re.findall(pattern, text))
    return commands

text = extract_pdf_text("/root/artifacts/paper.pdf")
commands = find_commands(text)

Extract Tables

import pdfplumber

def extract_tables(pdf_path: str) -> list:
    """Extract all tables from a PDF."""
    tables = []
    with pdfplumber.open(pdf_path) as pdf:
        for i, page in enumerate(pdf.pages):
            page_tables = page.extract_tables()
            for table in page_tables:
                tables.append({
                    "page": i + 1,
                    "data": table
                })
    return tables

Find Package Information

import re

def find_package_info(text: str) -> list:
    """Find npm package references (name@version)."""
    # Match patterns like node-rsync@1.0.3
    pattern = r'([a-z0-9-]+)@(\d+\.\d+\.\d+)'
    matches = re.findall(pattern, text.lower())
    return [{"name": m[0], "version": m[1]} for m in matches]

Tips

1. Check available PDFs first:

``bash ls -la /root/artifacts/ ``

1. Preview before full extraction:

``bash pdftotext /root/artifacts/paper.pdf - | head -100 ``

1. Handle multi-column layouts: pdfplumber handles them better than pdftotext

1. For structured data: Look for JSON blocks in the text:

```python import json import re

jsonblocks = re.findall(r'\{[^{}]*\}', text) for block in jsonblocks: try: data = json.loads(block) print(data) except json.JSONDecodeError: pass ```

Source & license

This open-source skill is cataloged on AgentStack and links to its original source — we do not rehost the code.

• Author: XuShuwenn
• Source: XuShuwenn/RedAct
• License: MIT

Install and usage instructions live in the source repository linked above.