Download Gated PDFs

by kennethkhoocy

Download Gated PDFs is an Automation skill for Claude Code, published by kennethkhoocy in applied-micro-skills.

48 stars0 forkson kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skillsAdded 2026/08/11Repository updated 2026/07/22

View source on GitHub Download repo ZIP

applied-microeconomicsclaude-codeclaude-skillscodexcodex-skillsempirical-research

Install in seconds

Install Download Gated PDFs

Copy Download Gated PDFs into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skills/tree/main/plugins/applied-micro/skills/download-gated-pdfs ~/.claude/skills/download-gated-pdfs

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skills.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: plugins/applied-micro/skills/download-gated-pdfs/SKILL.md in kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/download-gated-pdfs
Collection: One of 25 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Automation — 1523 skills

What Download Gated PDFs does

Downloads the actual PDF from bot-gated websites (e.g., taxpolicycenter.org, SSRN mirrors) that return HTML instead of PDFs. Uses the Wayback Machine's raw-content (id_) URL to obtain the original binary, bypassing bot challenges.

Download Gated PDFs is cataloged under Automation on DirSkills. Download Gated PDFs comes from a repository tagged applied-microeconomics, claude-code, claude-skills, codex and codex-skills.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

Download bot-gated PDFs via Wayback id_

Problem

Many think-tank and publisher sites (taxpolicycenter.org, urban.org, SSRN delivery) serve an HTML bot-challenge page instead of the PDF to non-browser clients. A browser User-Agent header does not help. The downloaded "PDF" is actually HTML.

Context / Trigger Conditions

curl -o file.pdf <url> succeeds but the file starts with <!DOC
pypdf raises invalid pdf header: b'<!DOC' or PdfStreamError: Stream has ended unexpectedly
Firecrawl scrape returns clean markdown for the same URL (its proxies get through), but Firecrawl does not return the binary — only parsed content

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Frequently asked about Download Gated PDFs

What else does kennethkhoocy publish alongside Download Gated PDFs?
Download Gated PDFs is one of 25 skills that DirSkills catalogs from kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Adversarial Empirical Review, Annotator Input Parity Check and AsyncOpenAI Concurrency Fix. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Download Gated PDFs does, and is maintained by kennethkhoocy in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the kennethkhoocy/applied-micro-skills page.
How does Download Gated PDFs compare to other Automation skills?
Download Gated PDFs ranks #1425 by stars among the 1523 Automation skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Autonomous Loops, Autonomous Agent Harness and Automation Audit Ops. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Download Gated PDFs against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.