# PDF Research

> Research PDF documents — parse, chunk, search, and extract passages. Use when the source material is PDF files (papers, reports, manuals).

- Skill: `samraddhashrivastavatech/pdf-research` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add samraddhashrivastavatech/pdf-research`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/samraddhashrivastavatech/pdf-research/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Docs & Writing
- Author: SAMRADDHASHRIVASTAVATECH (https://skillmd.com/u/samraddhashrivastavatech)
- Updated: 2026-09-22
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/samraddhashrivastavatech/pdf-research

---


# PDF research

Find and mine PDF documents: parse text, chunk it, and retrieve the passages
that answer a question.

## When to use

- The evidence is in a PDF (paper, spec, manual, whitepaper).
- Extracting quotable passages with page/section location.
- Building a PDF-backed corpus for evidence extraction or a literature review.

## Tools used

- `pdf_research` — find relevant PDFs (`query`, `limit`).
- `search_documents` — content search with `filetype: "pdf"` (default).

## Workflow

1. `pdf_research` (or `search_documents`) to locate PDFs.
2. Parse: extract text page-by-page; chunk into section-labeled spans.
3. Retrieve the relevant chunks for the question; keep page + chunk ids.
4. Never execute anything embedded in the PDF (scripts, macros, actions).

## Input schema

```json
{ "query": "str", "limit": "int" }
```

## Output schema

```json
{ "results": "list[{url,title,chunks:[{page,text}]}]" }
```

## Security

PDFs can contain scripts/actions/embedded objects. Treat the file as untrusted
data; extraction only, no execution, and keep files task-scoped.

## Related skills

`document-research`, `academic-research`, `literature-review`,
`evidence-extraction`