anthropic-pdf vs pdf-creator: manipulate or generate?

A common confusion: “I want to use a Claude skill for PDFs — which one?”. The answer depends on which direction you’re going.

anthropic-pdf is for working with PDFs that already exist. pdf-creator is for generating new PDFs from Markdown. They don’t compete — they chain.

Side by side

	anthropic-pdf	pdf-creator
Direction	Operates on existing PDFs	Generates PDFs from Markdown
Author	Anthropic (official)	daymade
Engine	pypdf, PyMuPDF, OCR	WeasyPrint (HTML/CSS to PDF)
Read text/tables	Yes	n/a
Merge/split	Yes	n/a
Watermark	Yes	n/a
OCR scanned	Yes	n/a
Generate from MD	n/a	Yes
CJK font support	n/a	Yes (proper rendering)
Print-quality layout	n/a	Yes (CSS @page)

anthropic-pdf — work with existing PDFs

Use it when you already have a .pdf and need to:

Read or extract text/tables/metadata
Merge multiple PDFs into one
Split a PDF into per-page files
Add watermarks, page numbers, headers
Encrypt, decrypt, password-protect
Fill PDF forms programmatically
OCR a scanned PDF to make it searchable

It is not a Markdown → PDF tool.

pdf-creator — generate PDFs with proper Chinese rendering

Use it when:

Source is Markdown (notes, articles, reports).
Output is print-quality PDF.
Chinese / Japanese / Korean text needs to render without missing glyphs.
You want modern CSS print features (page-break, named pages, running headers).

It is not for manipulating existing PDFs.

They chain naturally

The most common pipeline:

Markdown source
  → [pdf-creator] generate.pdf
  → [anthropic-pdf] add watermark, page numbers, encrypt
  → final.pdf

For a research report distributed bilingually:

Write Markdown.
pdf-creator renders to PDF with proper CJK fonts.
anthropic-pdf adds watermark + DRM-style encryption.

For an existing internal PDF you want to redistribute:

anthropic-pdf OCRs the scanned pages, extracts text.
(Optional) Convert to Markdown for editing.
pdf-creator re-generates with cleaned styling.

30-second decision

You have a PDF and need to modify it             → anthropic-pdf
You have Markdown and need print-quality PDF     → pdf-creator
Chinese / CJK content?                            → pdf-creator
Need to fill a PDF form?                          → anthropic-pdf
Need OCR on a scanned PDF?                        → anthropic-pdf
Generating a research report end-to-end?         → both, chained