PDF Text — extract the text layer from a PDF

This skill pulls the text layer out of a PDF with Poppler's pdftotext and returns plain text, either on stdout or in a file you name. It covers whole documents, page ranges (numbered from 1, -f and -l inclusive), and multi-column pages, where -layout keeps the columns where they were on the page and -nopgbrk drops the form feeds between pages.

The one requirement is Poppler utils — poppler-utils on Debian/Ubuntu, poppler via Homebrew on macOS. pdftotext -h lists the flags for the build you have, which is the authority the skill defers to.

The limits are stated plainly, because they define the tool. pdftotext reads the embedded text layer only: a scanned page with no text layer produces an empty result, and OCR is a different tool. The skill's check is simple — a text layer comes back as words; an empty file means the pages are images, and the job stops there instead of guessing.

An encrypted file makes pdftotext exit with an error; the skill's rule is to stop and ask the user rather than guess passwords. -raw mode is noted as no longer recommended; -layout is the right default for anything multi-column.