Digital-Printing
A Claude Code plugin with skills for preparing PDFs and documents for digital printing.
The plugin covers the full pre-print pipeline: profiling a PDF, fixing the obscure problems that bite on office printers (non-embedded fonts, live transparency, oversized images, mixed color spaces), preparing the layout (resize, bind, strip footers, add cover pages, watermarks, branded footers), bundling files into a print job folder with a formal order document, and shipping it to a digital printer by email or Google Drive share.
Scope: v1 is documents (PDFs) only. Skills for image and banner prep (JPEG/TIFF/canvas-size/print-bleed for posters, etc.) will be added later.
Skills
Page-level transforms
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|
resize-page | Rescale page size — Letter ↔ A4, A5 ↔ A4, custom dimensions |
color-to-grayscale | Convert color PDF to grayscale for monochrome printing |
remove-pages | Drop specified pages, ranges, or auto-detected blanks |
strip-footers-and-page-numbers | Whiteout or text-aware footer removal |
optimize-for-binding | Add gutter; mirror margins for duplex |
add-cover-page | Generate matching-size cover with title and prepend |
Overlays
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|
add-watermark | 45° diagonal text watermark (DRAFT, PRIVATE, etc.) at low opacity |
burn-in-footer | Permanent footer label (CLIENT CONFIDENTIAL, EMBARGOED UNTIL, etc.) with PNG preview verification |
Pre-flight & quality fixes
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|
verify-bleed-safe | Read-only check: does any content extend into the unprintable margin? |
add-bleed | Add 3mm bleed for commercial print shops that trim |
embed-fonts | Force-embed all fonts (fixes the most common print-mismatch bug) |
flatten-transparency | Eliminate live transparency (banding/color shifts on cheap printers) |
downsample-images | Cap embedded images at 300 DPI; reduces file size and printer memory load |
normalize-color-profile | Standardize on sRGB (office) or CMYK FOGRA39 (print shop) |
Metadata
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|
strip-metadata | Wipe author, title, producer, comments, XMP |
write-metadata | Set title, author, subject, keywords |
Job packaging & sharing
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|
create-job-folder | Bundle one or more verified PDFs into a single job folder with a manifest |
create-print-order | Generate a formal printer-facing order (PDF + JSON) — copies, color, paper, binding, finishing, contact info |
zip-job-folder | Archive the folder for transmission |
upload-to-printing-folder | Move a finished PDF into the user's printing folder, organized by date or printer per saved preference |
share-job-folder | Send the job to a printer or recipient via email (zip attached) and/or Google Drive share link |
Agent
| Agent | Purpose |
|---|
print-prep-orchestrator | Profiles a PDF (fonts, images, transparency, color, bleed safety, metadata) and orchestrates the right combination of atomic skills to make it print-ready, with a confirm-before-execute plan |
Typical workflows
One-shot prep, then upload:
Hand a PDF to the orchestrator → it profiles & produces a print-ready output → upload-to-printing-folder
Build a multi-file job for a print shop:
For each file: run orchestrator → verify-bleed-safe
Then: create-job-folder → create-print-order → zip-job-folder → share-job-folder
Quick fix for a misbehaving PDF:
embed-fonts → flatten-transparency → downsample-images
Configuration
The plugin keeps small config (printing folder location, subfolder strategy, contact info, printer contacts) at:
$CLAUDE_USER_DATA/digital-printing/config.json
with the standard fallback ${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/claude-plugins/digital-printing/config.json.
User-owned data — the printing folder itself, job folders — lives wherever the user chose during onboarding (typically ~/Documents/Printing/ or a Google Drive folder). The plugin only stores the pointer in its config.
The plugin never writes to its own install directory under ~/.claude/plugins/, which is overwritten on plugin updates.
Tooling assumptions
The skills assume these standard CLI tools are available. Skills will check and prompt to install if missing:
ghostscript (gs) — most heavy lifting (resize, grayscale, embed, flatten, downsample, color profile)qpdf — page selection, overlays, linearizepoppler-utils (pdfinfo, pdffonts, pdfimages, pdftotext) — probingmupdf-tools (mutool) — alternative geometry probe, transparency detectionexiftool — metadata read/writepdfjam (from texlive-extra-utils) — gutter/binding offsets, bleedpython3 with reportlab — overlay PDF generation for watermarks/footerstypst (optional) — clean cover pages and order documentszip
Installation
danielrosehill
danielrosehill
