pdf-read — Reading Pipeline

A Skill that orchestrates the most frequent job of all: getting content out of a PDF. Where pdf-trust audits a PDF you received and pdf-publish guarantees a PDF you ship, pdf-read covers the third path — extract the section you need from a 500-page document, read a scanned page as an image — and closes with a Read Report that states what was read and, just as deliberately, what could not be.

The core rule

An empty extraction result is not evidence that a page has no text. ISO 32000-2 §9.10.1 defines the state where glyphs can be shown but cannot be converted to Unicode, and pdf-reader-mcp v0.12.0 reports it per page: extracted / no_text_layer (a scan — the text is pixels) / not_extractable (a font offers no route to Unicode, with the fonts named) / not_observed (encrypted or unreadable). This Skill reads that state before the text, and never concludes "not in the document" over pages it could not read. v0.14.0 adds scope — which of the two readings behind an answer were done — and makes a field whose reading did not happen null rather than 0, false or ""; the Skill branches on that, so a password-protected document is stopped even when the reader could not open it far enough to say isEncrypted.

Phases

Phase	What happens
0 Measure	summarize (JSON): page count, tagged?, encrypted?, per-page extractability, and the reader's own next suggestions
1 Branch	encrypted → stop (the reader does not decrypt); unreadable pages → Phase 4; tagged → Phase 2; else → Phase 3
2 Structure route	extract_structured_text (logical content order, real headings), extract_tables (page-spanning tables stay whole)
3 Narrow & extract	past ~50 pages, search_text first, then read_text with an explicit page range; split_columns for untagged multi-column, compact_whitespace for Japanese forms
4 Image route	render_page (PDFium-WASM) rasterises the page; a vision model reads the pixels, and the Report says the content came from an image
5 Read Report	pages read, route used, extractability tally, what could not be read and why, truncation if any

Read Report

## Read Report
- Target: report.pdf (412 pages)
- Read: pages 12-18, 301 / Route: narrowed (search_text → read_text)
- Extractability: extracted 410, no_text_layer 2 (pages 87, 88)
- Could not read: pages 87-88 are image-only (read via render_page, reported as such)
- Truncation: none

The "could not read" line is never left blank by default — it says "none" only when that was verified. An unchecked blank would read as "checked, no problems".

Installation

/plugin marketplace add shuji-bonji/claude-plugins
/plugin install pdf-reader-mcp@shuji-bonji   # required foundation (v0.14.0+ recommended)
/plugin install pdf-read@shuji-bonji

render_page uses the reader's optional dependency @hyzyla/pdfium (PDFium compiled to WebAssembly). Without it, every other tool works and the Skill reports the affected pages as unread, with the install command.

Repository: shuji-bonji/pdf-read-skill

Out of scope

• OCR — replaced by render + vision reading, and declared as such in the Report
• Authenticity and tamper auditing → pdf-trust
• Generating or editing PDFs → pdf-publish
• Structural inspection of PDFs at a URL — read_url returns text only; download first, then pass the local path