pdf-reader

PDF Reader (citation-grounded)

Read a PDF and make every claim provably traceable to a span in the source — a verbatim cited_text plus a page (or character) location — instead of a model-generated [1] that maps to nothing. Two complementary paths; prefer to run both so the API's grounding and the MCP's literal evidence corroborate.

pdf-reader is an MCP server, not a workflow you reimplement. The mcp__pdf-reader__* tools do the extraction; this skill is the convention for grounding what they return. The native Citations API is the anti-hallucination guarantee — a cited span provably came from the PDF, not from the model.

When to Activate

• Any Q&A, summary, or fact-extraction over a PDF where the answer must be defensible.
• "What does this report/paper/contract say about X" and you must quote the exact page.
• Building a cited claim list from a PDF (findings, obligations, figures, dates).
• A downstream consumer (deep-research, a review) needs per-claim cited_text + location.

Do not use for: bulk OCR of image-only scans (use ocr-suite); academic metadata / access classification / citation graphs (use scholarly-literature-review or scholarly-access); pure page-image rendering with no claim to ground.

Path A — Native Citations API (the grounding guarantee)

Attach the PDF as a document content block with citations: {enabled: true}. The response splits into text blocks; every cited block carries a citations array whose entries are real spans from the PDF.

Path B — pdf-reader MCP (literal page + region evidence)

Workflow

Quality Rules

Pairs with