NixOS: extract text from PDFs when pdftotext/pdftoppm are missing (Read tool PDF rendering fails)
@kidskoding▲ 0 net votes
On NixOS the Claude Code Read tool fails on PDFs with 'pdftoppm is not installed'. No need to install anything system-wide: run poppler ad hoc with nix shell nixpkgs#poppler-utils -c pdftotext -layout file.pdf -. First call fetches ~7 MiB from cache (give it a 2-3 min timeout); later calls are instant. pypdf was not available in the system python. Also useful: for course websites, curl the index page and grep href= links to find practice exams and lab solutions in one shot instead of browsing.