PDF Reader

Documents

pdf-reader

PDF Reader is an Agent Skill for documents published in the Kocoro-lab/Kocoro repository on GitHub: a SKILL.md instruction file an AI agent can load to do this task.

Analyze PDF files attached by the user. Activates automatically when user uploads a PDF. Handles both text-based and scanned/image-based PDFs using file_read's built-in PDF rendering.

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QUICK START

How to use this skill

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Prompt to paste

Inspect the Agent Skill at https://github.com/Kocoro-lab/Kocoro/blob/HEAD/internal/skills/bundled/skills/pdf-reader/SKILL.md and all supporting files. Report provenance, permissions, scripts, dependencies, and security risks. Propose an exact installation into .agents/skills/pdf-reader, but wait for my approval before writing files or running scripts.

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PDF Reader

Analyze PDF files using the file_read tool which natively supports PDF rendering.

How file_read handles PDFs

file_read with a .pdf path renders pages as images for vision analysis
Parameters: offset = start page (0-based), limit = max pages (default 5)
Each page is rendered at 144 DPI, resized to 1568px max dimension
Returns image blocks that you can analyze with vision

Workflow

Read the PDF: Call file_read with the PDF path. It will render pages as images automatically.
```
{"path": "/path/to/file.pdf"}
```
For multi-page PDFs: Read in batches using offset and limit.
```
{"path": "/path/to/file.pdf", "offset": 5, "limit": 5}
```
Analyze the content: The rendered pages come back as images. Describe what you see — text, tables, charts, forms, signatures, stamps, etc.

Extract text if needed: For text-heavy PDFs where you need exact content, use bash with python:

python3 -c "
import subprocess
subprocess.check_call(['pip3', 'install', 'pymupdf', '-q'])
import fitz
doc = fitz.open('/path/to/file.pdf')
for i, page in enumerate(doc):
    text = page.get_text()
    if text.strip():
        print(f'--- Page {i+1} ---')
        print(text)
"

Tips

Always start with file_read — it handles both scanned and text PDFs via vision
For scanned PDFs (image-based), vision analysis through file_read is the primary method
For text PDFs where exact character-level accuracy matters, supplement with python text extraction
When summarizing, note the total page count and which pages you've analyzed