PDF Reader - OpenClaw Skill — OpenClaw Tutorials

Install Command

npx clawhub@latest install pdf

Installation Guide

Check Environment

Make sure Node.js 22+ and OpenClaw are installed. Run openclaw --version in your terminal to verify.

Run Installation

Run the install command above in your terminal. ClawHub will automatically download and install PDF Reader to the ~/.openclaw/skills/ directory.

Verify Installation

Run openclaw skills list to check your installed skills and confirm PDF Reader appears in the list.

Configure (Optional)

Follow the configuration instructions in the description below to add skill settings to ~/.config/openclaw/openclaw.json5.

Manual Installation: Copy the Skill folder to ~/.openclaw/skills/ or the skills/ directory in your project root. Make sure the folder contains a SKILL.md file.

Text Extraction Table Recognition Content Q&A

Detailed Description

The PDF Reader skill enables OpenClaw to directly read and understand PDF file contents, transforming PDFs from static, non-interactive documents into knowledge sources you can have a conversation with.

Core Features

Full Text Extraction: Extracts the complete text from PDFs while preserving basic formatting structure
Table Recognition: Intelligently recognizes tables in PDFs and converts them to structured data
Paginated Reading: Supports reading by page range for large PDFs, avoiding loading too much content at once
Image OCR: For scanned PDFs, supports OCR to recognize text within images
Conversational Q&A: After reading a PDF, you can ask questions based on the document content

Configuration

{
  skills: {
    pdf: {
      ocrEnabled: true,     // Enable OCR
      maxPages: 50,         // Max pages per processing
      tableExtraction: true // Table extraction
    }
  }
}

Use Cases

Analyzing academic papers and technical white papers
Reading and extracting key information from contracts, invoices, and other business documents
Q&A on product manuals
Batch extracting data from multiple PDFs for aggregation

How to Use

Send a PDF file to OpenClaw (via the chat platform's file sending feature), then ask your question directly. You can also reference a local PDF by file path.

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