Individual skill
robust-pdf-read
Reliably extract text from PDFs using pdftotext when standard file reading fails.
benchmarks/gdpval/skills/robust-pdf-read/SKILL.md
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# Robust PDF Text Extraction
## Problem
Standard file reading tools (e.g., `read_file`) often fail to extract text from PDF documents. Instead of returning parsed text, they may return:
- Raw binary data
- Base64 encoded images
- Garbled characters or null bytes
This occurs because PDFs are complex binary formats, not plain text files. Attempts to parse them using general-purpose Python libraries (like PyMuPDF) in sandboxed environments may also fail due to missing dependencies or environment restrictions.
## Solution
Use the `pdftotext` command-line utility (part of `poppler-utils`) via `run_shell`. This tool is commonly pre-installed in Linux environments and reliably extracts text content from PDFs.
## Procedure