PDF maker and reader

Give it a PDF or a brief. Get the text pulled out or a new PDF with its layout checked.

PDF maker and reader is a free AI skill for the job "Make documents, sheets and slides". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.

Free · No account · Apache 2.0 licence · Made by OpenAI · Level: beginner · Thinking: low

Made by OpenAI. See the original on GitHub; we copied it as it is, with its licence.

What it does

Read a PDF without trusting raw text alone, or make a new one and see for yourself that it looks right. The key habit is rendering pages to images and looking at them after every change, because text extraction cannot tell you about layout. To read, it pulls text with pdfplumber or pypdf for quick checks and renders each page to a PNG with pdftoppm for a visual look. To create, it writes the file with reportlab, then re-renders and checks alignment, spacing and legibility. Scratch files go in a temp folder and finals in an output folder with stable names. It needs Python packages and Poppler installed.

You give it

A PDF to read, or a brief for a new one
Content and layout wishes for a new file
Output file name (optional)
A buyer brief (optional)

You get

Extracted text from a PDF
Page images to review
A new PDF made with reportlab
A layout check after each update

Use it when

You need a one-page PDF report with a set layout.
You want to check that a generated PDF has no cut-off text.
You need quick text from a PDF and a look at how it is laid out.
A PDF output keeps shifting and you need a render-and-fix loop.

How to use it

Add it to your AI once: download it and add the folder to Claude, ChatGPT or Codex as a skill.
Ask for the job in your own words. Your AI opens the skill when it fits.
It works best when your AI can run code.