diillson/chatcli/pdf-tools

PDF Tools

Local, keyless PDF manipulation. Detect what's installed and use it; nothing leaves the machine.

Step 0 — Detect tools

• macOS / Linux: command -v qpdf pdftk pdftotext pdfinfo pdftoppm img2pdf gs 2>/dev/null
• Windows: Get-Command qpdf, pdftk, pdftotext -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

Install hints: brew install qpdf poppler img2pdf ghostscript / apt install qpdf poppler-utils img2pdf ghostscript / choco install qpdf.

Common operations

Merge (qpdf preferred, pdftk fallback):

qpdf --empty --pages a.pdf b.pdf -- merged.pdf
pdftk a.pdf b.pdf cat output merged.pdf

Split / extract pages:

qpdf in.pdf --pages in.pdf 2-5 -- pages_2_5.pdf
pdftk in.pdf cat 1 3 5 output odd.pdf

Rotate:

qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=+90:1-z

Compress (Ghostscript):

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -o small.pdf in.pdf

Extract text (then summarize/answer with @read):

pdftotext -layout in.pdf out.txt

PDF → images / images → PDF:

pdftoppm -png -r 150 in.pdf page
img2pdf img1.png img2.jpg -o out.pdf

Inspect: pdfinfo in.pdf (page count, size, encryption).

Rules

• Work on copies; never overwrite the user's source PDF unless told to.
• For scanned/image PDFs with no text layer, hand off to the ocr skill.
• Report output path + page count after each operation.