SkillVerdict
All verdicts

pdf

Install with caution anthropics/skills

Anthropic's PDF processing skill runs Python scripts for forms, merging and OCR, and its license is Proprietary — read before you redistribute.

Verified · Repo on GitHub

What it does

Anything with PDFs: extract text/tables, merge/split/rotate, watermark, create PDFs, fill forms, encrypt/decrypt, extract images, OCR scanned PDFs. It is a guide (SKILL.md, forms.md, reference.md) plus Python helper scripts using common PDF libraries/CLI tools.

Who made it / license / last checked

Anthropic (anthropics/skills) · License: Proprietary — its SKILL.md says so and LICENSE.txt restricts extracting/retaining copies outside Anthropic's services and reproducing them (read the file yourself) · Repo last commit checked: 2026-10-28

Install

/plugin install document-skills@anthropic-agent-skills

From anthropics/skills README. Individual skill-folder copying may breach that proprietary license — prefer the official plugin route.

What files / scripts it runs

8 Python scripts in scripts/ (we wrote 9 on 19 Oct: our counting error) (form-field extraction, fillable-field filling, PDF-to-images, bounding-box checks, etc., each ~0.3–4 KB in our clone). They operate on PDFs you point them at; we saw no network calls in a grep of those scripts, but we did not execute them.

Pros

  • Real tooling, not just a prompt: form filling and validation images are genuinely fiddly by hand
  • Official source, detailed forms/reference guides
  • Scripts are small and readable before you run them

Cons

  • Proprietary license is the catch — do not copy this folder into your own redistributed product
  • Python/CLI dependencies (see reference.md) mean it can fail on a bare machine
  • Form-filling scripts write files — test on a copy of any important PDF first

Alternatives

Your OS/Python PDF tools directly (pypdf etc. — the skill itself is largely a guide to them); a hosted PDF API if you need this in production.

Notes

Individual skill install count: unknown to us — we did not find a verified per-skill figure we trust, so we do not print one.

Sources

Checked 19 Oct 2026 (Europe/Madrid) from local clones of the repos above. Repo last-commit is a repo date, not a per-skill release date. Install counts, where quoted, are skills.sh leaderboard figures fetched that day and are distribution, not quality.

Verified on 2026-11-04 through the GitHub API: it has had no commit since the 30 Oct check, so the files, sizes and verdict above still hold. Previous check on 2026-10-30, against a fresh clone (repo commit ca45fc4, 2026-10-28). Since 19 Oct: no change to the skill; the skills/pdf folder has had no commit since February 2026. It has 8 scripts (0.3–4.3 KB each); the 9 we gave on 19 Oct was our counting error, now corrected. The SKILL.md frontmatter still says license: Proprietary. A grep of the 8 scripts for requests, urllib, http and socket found no network code; we still did not run them. Verdict unchanged.