SECURITY REVIEW
Not yet assessed
Review the original instructions and requested permissions before installing.
No security review is available for this catalog entry yet.
Automation · Documentation / AGENT SKILL
pdf-to-markdown
0
Convert PDFs to clean Markdown offline, preserving tables and sidebars and supporting OCR.
Convert PDF files to clean Markdown offline and deterministically, with tables (ruled and borderless/booktabs) and sidebars placed inline and PDF metadata stripped. Use whenever the user wants a PDF turned into Markdown or text, wants a paper/report/scan extracted, asks what is in a PDF, or mentions pdf2md or pdf-to-md-transformer. Handles scanned PDFs via Tesseract OCR.
Understand the trade-offs.
SKILL QUALITY
Not yet assessed
How clearly the skill guides your agent, how complete its workflow is, and how you can check the outcome.
No quality assessment is available for this catalog entry yet.
The full skill.
Original instructions from the publisher’s SKILL.md
# PDF to Markdown
Converts PDFs to GitHub-flavoured Markdown with no network calls and no
randomness — the same file and version always produce byte-identical output.
Document metadata (Info dictionary, XMP, producer strings) is never emitted.
## Check the tool is installed
```bash
pdf2md --version || pip install /path/to/pdf_to_md_transformer
```
If the `pdf2md` MCP server is registered, use its `pdf_info`, `convert_pdf`,
and `convert_file` tools instead of the shell — same engine, same results.
## Workflow
1. **Inspect first** on an unfamiliar PDF:
```bash
python3 -c "
import json, pdfplumber
from pdf_to_md.ocr import ocr_available, page_needs_ocr
with pdfplumber.open('paper.pdf') as p:
scanned = [i + 1 for i, pg in enumerate(p.pages) if page_needs_ocr(pg)]
print(json.dumps({'pages_needing_ocr': scanned, 'ocr': ocr_available()}))"
```
(Or the `pdf_info` MCP tool, which does exactly this.)
2. **Convert.** Write to a file unless the document is short:
```bash
pdf2md paper.pdf -o out/ --json # JSON report on stdout
pdf2md paper.pdf --stdout # Markdown on stdout (short docs)
pdf2md paper.pdf -o out/ --extract-images # figures as PNGs too
```
Batch: pass several paths; exit code is 1 if any file failed, and the
per-file outcome is in the `--json` report.
3. **Read back** only the section you need (`grep`, `sed -n`) rather than
pulling a whole book into context.
## Reporting results honestly
- Scanned pages with **no OCR engine available** are skipped and replaced by an
explanatory HTML comment. Say so; don't report a clean conversion. Fix with
`brew install tesseract` / `apt install tesseract-ocr`, or point
`PDF2MD_TESSERACT` at a binary.
- OCR'd pages carry a provenance comment (engine version, psm, dpi, language)
and, where anything looked doubtful, a list of numeric tokens to check
against the source. Pass that list on to the user — don't strip it. An
unflagged number is likely right, not certainly right.
- For a non-English scan pass `--ocr-lang` (e.g. `deu`, `fra+eng`); the default
`eng` silently degrades other languages.
- Figures are anchored in place with their captions, but the images themselves
are only written out with `--extract-images` (into `<name>_assets/`). Without
it the Markdown carries `<!-- figure: … image not extracted -->` markers — say
so rather than implying the figures are in the output.
- Equations are either reconstructed LaTeX in a `$$` block (inferred from glyph
geometry — tell the user it should be checked) or a ```` ```equation ```` block
holding the raw glyph run, which the parser refused to interpret. Never retype
a raw block as LaTeX yourself. Inline maths inside a paragraph is still
garbled and unmarked.
- Re-running never changes the output — if it is wrong, the input or the tool
needs attention, not another attempt.
Full interface reference: [AGENTS.md](../../../AGENTS.md).