Best PDF Skills for Claude Code
PDF workflows for Claude Code — reading, merging, splitting, and form-filling, plus the document skills that convert PDFs to and from editable formats.
Use this skill whenever the user wants to create, read, edit, or manipulate Word documents (.docx…
Official-grade docx skill: task-routing table, battle-tested gotchas, validation and render-to-image verification loop; only minor gaps are missing shebangs.
Use this skill any time a .pptx or .potx file is involved in any way — as input, output, or both.…
Outstanding official pptx skill: task routing, hard-won corruption gotchas, ordering constraints, and a mandatory three-layer QA loop; only minor nits like missing shebangs.
Use this skill whenever the user wants to do anything with PDF files. This includes reading or ex…
Solid official PDF cookbook with good offload to reference/forms docs and a gated form-filling workflow; main body is recipe-style and path casing (REFERENCE.md vs reference.md) is sloppy.
Score comparison
How the top 3 compare across the six evaluation dimensions (0–10). Full written rationale for every score is on each skill's page.
FAQ
Can Claude Code edit PDF files?
Yes — with the pdf skill installed, Claude Code reads, merges, splits, extracts text from, and fills forms in PDF files. Its gated form-filling workflow verifies field mappings before writing anything.
Can Claude Code convert PDF to Word or PowerPoint?
Yes — the docx and pptx skills handle conversion in both directions. For scanned PDFs, expect OCR-quality results; for native PDFs, extraction is reliable.
Is there an official PDF skill?
Yes — the pdf skill is maintained by Anthropic and scores 8.6/10. The score reflects the problem domain (PDF is a hostile format), not the skill's engineering.
Every skill here was scored on the same six-dimension rubric — the full scorecard with written rationale is on each skill's page. See more in the document and marketing skill collections, or see all PDF skills.