pdf-extraction-guide
PDF parsing, text extraction, and document format conversion
Profile →npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills --skill pdf-extraction-guide --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# PDF Extraction Guide Extract text, tables, figures, and metadata from academic PDFs using Python libraries, with strategies for handling multi-column layouts, mathematical content, and scanned documents. ## PDF Extraction Tools Comparison | Tool | Text | Tables | Figures | Layout | OCR | Speed | |------|------|--------|---------|--------|-----|-------| | PyMuPDF (fitz) | Excellent | Manual | Yes | Blocks | No (add with OCR engine) | Fast | | pdfplumber | Good | Excellent | No | Tables focus | No | Medium | | PyPDF2 / pypdf | Basic | No | No | No | No | Fast | | Tabula-py | No | Excellent | No | No | No | Medium | | GROBID | Structured | Yes | References | Academic layout | No | Slow (ML-based) | | Nougat (Meta) | Excellent | Yes | Yes | Academic layout | Built-in | Slow (GPU) | | Marker | Excellent | Yes | Yes | Multi-column | Built-in | Medium | | pdf2image + Tesseract | Via OCR | Via OCR | Via OCR | No | Yes | Slow | ## PyMuPDF (fitz) — Fast Text Extraction ### Basic Text Extraction ```python import fitz # pip install PyMuPDF def extract_text(pdf_path): """Extract all text from a PDF with page numbers.""" doc = fitz.open(pdf_path) full_text = [] for page_num, page in enumerate(
- PDF Extraction Tools Comparison
- PyMuPDF (fitz) — Fast Text Extraction
- Basic Text Extraction
- Structured Block-Level Extraction
- Extract Images and Figures
- pdfplumber — Table Extraction
- GROBID — Structured Academic Paper Parsing
- Document Chunking for RAG
- Format Conversion
- Markdown to PDF
- PDF to Markdown (Using Marker)
- OCR for Scanned PDFs
- Best Practices
Using Pandoc (most versatile converter) pandoc paper.md -o paper.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex With template and bibliography pandoc paper.md -o paper.pdf \ Markdown to Word (for collaborators who prefer Word) pandoc paper.md -o paper.docx --reference-doc=template.docx Install Marker (ML-based PDF to Markdown converter) pip install marker-pdf Convert a single PDF marker_single paper.pdf output_dir/ --langs English
What does the pdf-extraction-guide skill do?
PDF parsing, text extraction, and document format conversion
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills --skill pdf-extraction-guide --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From brycewang-stanford/Auto-Empirical-Research-Skills, a repository with 3,244 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.