pdf-analysis

majiayu000's avatarfrom majiayu000

Analyze PDF documents including reports, whitepapers, ebooks, and manuals. Use when the user mentions PDF, document, whitepaper, ebook, report file, or wants to analyze a .pdf file.

⭐0stars🔀0forks📁View on GitHub🕐Updated Jan 5, 2026
[Summarization]

When & Why to Use This Skill

This Claude skill provides professional-grade PDF document analysis, enabling users to transform complex reports, whitepapers, and manuals into structured, actionable insights. It automates the extraction of key points, metadata, and data summaries, saving the results into organized markdown reports with automated activity logging for seamless knowledge management.

Use Cases

  • Academic and Market Research: Rapidly distill long-form whitepapers, ebooks, and academic journals into concise summaries and key findings to accelerate the literature review process.
  • Business Intelligence: Extract critical data and insights from corporate annual reports or industry manuals to generate structured internal briefings and decision-support documents.
  • Document Management and Archiving: Automatically organize analyzed files by extracting metadata (author, date, title) and maintaining a chronological activity log for easy retrieval and tracking.
  • Technical Documentation Review: Process technical manuals and specifications to identify specific requirements or instructions without manual page-flipping.
namepdf-analysis
descriptionAnalyze PDF documents including reports, whitepapers, ebooks, and manuals. Use when the user mentions PDF, document, whitepaper, ebook, report file, or wants to analyze a .pdf file.

PDF Document Analysis

Analyze PDF documents to generate structured reports with summaries, key points, data extraction, and insights.

When to Use

Activate this skill when the user:

  • Mentions "PDF", "document", "whitepaper", "ebook", "report"
  • Provides a file path to a .pdf file
  • Asks to summarize or analyze a PDF document
  • Wants to extract insights from a document file
  • References a downloaded report or paper

Instructions

  1. Get the file path - Ask the user for the PDF file path if not provided
  2. Verify the file exists and is readable
  3. Read the PDF content using the Read tool
    • The Read tool can extract text from PDF files
  4. If reading fails:
    • If PDF appears to be scanned/image-based: Inform user OCR may be needed
    • Suggest alternative approaches if text extraction fails
  5. Read the analysis prompt from prompts/pdf.md
  6. Extract document metadata from content:
    • Title (from content or derive from filename)
    • Author if mentioned
    • Date if mentioned
  7. Generate analysis following the prompt structure exactly
  8. Create output directory reports/pdfs/ if needed
  9. Save the report to reports/pdfs/YYYY-MM-DD_sanitized-title.md where:
    • YYYY-MM-DD is today's date
    • sanitized-title is the title in lowercase, spaces replaced with hyphens, special chars removed, max 50 chars
  10. Update the activity log at logs/YYYY-MM-DD.md:
    • Create file if it doesn't exist with standard sections
    • Add entry under "## PDFs Reviewed" section (create if needed)
    • Format: - [Title](../reports/pdfs/filename.md) - HH:MM
  11. Confirm to user what was saved and where

Report Format

Include this header in the report:

# [Document Title]

**Source**: [file path]
**Date**: YYYY-MM-DD
**Type**: PDF Document

---

[Analysis content following prompts/pdf.md structure]

---

## My Notes

[Empty space for user notes]

Error Handling

  • If file path doesn't exist: Ask user for correct path
  • If file is not a PDF: Suggest using /analyze for other file types
  • If text extraction fails: Suggest OCR or manual copy
  • If prompts/pdf.md missing: Use prompts/default.md

Related

  • Slash command equivalent: /pdf <filepath>
  • Prompt file: prompts/pdf.md
  • Output location: reports/pdfs/