# PDF To Text

> Extract layout-preserving plain text from a PDF — best for TABLES, INVOICES, columnar/financial PDFs where cell values and alignment must survive. Parse each PDF ONCE to a file. To find a specific fact, prefer a bounded grep -n -i -C2 "term" file | head. Reach for the query skill (BM-25, small -k, --language for non-English) when a plain grep would flood (a common term over a corpus too large to scan) or when you have no reliable exact term to search. Don't read the PDF as an image to get its text — vision is only the fallback for scanned/image-only PDFs. Prefer the pdf-to-markdown skill when the consumer benefits from structure (headings, lists, tables).

## Facts
- Page: https://tashan.sh/capability/skill-pspdfkit-labs-pdf-to-text
- tashan id: skill:PSPDFKit-labs/pdf-to-text
- Source: https://github.com/PSPDFKit-labs/nutrient-skills
- Type: skill
- Category: other
- tashan score: not scored (catalogued only — too little public evidence)
- Adoption: 9.0
- Upkeep: 99.0
- Freshness: 97.0
- Evidence coverage: 84% of the inputs this score can use
- Health: active
- Instruction depth: not yet graded
- Official: no

## Install

```sh
cp -r pdf-to-text ~/.claude/skills/
```

## Security audit
Not scanned. We audit npm-published capabilities; this one has no npm package we can resolve, or has not reached the queue. This is not a clean bill of health.

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Measured 2026-09-12 by tashan (https://tashan.sh) from public evidence. Scorer s5.