What an Agent Skill Is

An agent skill is a single SKILL.md file that teaches a coding agent how to use a library correctly. You drop it into your project, and the agent reads it before writing code against that library.

Coding agents already know roughly what our libraries do, because our documentation is on the public web. What they do not reliably know is the current API surface, which NuGet package to install for a given platform, where the licence key goes, or which patterns silently produce a broken result. That is what these files carry.

Each skill is written and maintained by Iron Software against the shipping product, so it reflects the API as it exists today rather than as it existed whenever the model was trained.

Available Skills

Every skill below targets C# / .NET.

LibraryNuGet PackageWhat the skill coversSkill file
IronPDFIronPdfHTML, URL, Markdown, RTF, DOCX and image to PDF; merging and splitting; stamps and watermarks; headers and footers; AcroForm fields; passwords, permissions and digital signatures; redaction; text, image and table extraction; PDF/A and PDF/UAironpdf.com/skill.md
IronBarcodeBarCodeReading and writing Code 39/93/128, GS1-128, Codabar, ITF, MSI, UPC-A/E, EAN-8/13, DataBar, Aztec, DataMatrix, MaxiCode, PDF417, QR, Micro QR and rMQRbarcode skill
IronOCRIronOcrOCR over images and scanned PDFs with Tesseract 5; making scanned PDFs searchable; receipts, MRZ passports and licence plates; handwriting; per-word confidence scores; image pre-processingocr skill
IronXLIronXL.ExcelXLSX, XLS, XLSM, XLTX, CSV and TSV; WorkBook, WorkSheet, Cell and Range objects; formulas and recalculation; styling and number formats; conditional formatting; named ranges, tables and chartsexcel skill
IronWordIronWordCreating and editing DOCX without Office or Word Interop; paragraphs and text runs; tables with borders, merged cells and striping; images; page setupword skill
IronPPTIronPPTGenerating and editing PPTX; slides, text runs and paragraphs; bulleted and numbered lists; images; shapes, text boxes and slide backgroundsppt skill
IronQRIronQRCreating QR codes from text, URLs or bytes; logo and colour branding; Micro QR and rMQR; error-correction levels; ML-based decoding from images, streams and multi-frame TIFFsqr skill
IronZIPIronZipZIP, TAR, GZIP and BZIP2 archives; AES-encrypted and password-protected ZIPs; adding, deleting and replacing entries; zipping folders; building archives from streamszip skill
IronPrintIronPrintSilent and headless printing; native print dialogs; printer discovery and selection; trays, paper size, orientation, margins, copies, DPI and grayscaleprint skill
IronWebScraperIronWebScraperWriting crawlers by subclassing WebScraper; CSS and XPath parsing; following links across pages; exporting as ScrapedData, JSON or JSONL; downloading files and imageswebscraper skill

Installing a Skill

Claude Code

Skills live in a skills directory alongside your project. Create one folder per skill and save the file into it as SKILL.md:

mkdir -p .claude/skills/ironpdf
curl -o .claude/skills/ironpdf/SKILL.md https://ironpdf.com/skill.md
mkdir -p .claude/skills/ironpdf
curl -o .claude/skills/ironpdf/SKILL.md https://ironpdf.com/skill.md
SHELL

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills/ to make the skill available to every project on your machine rather than just the current one.

Other agents

The file is plain Markdown with a short YAML header, so it is not tied to any one tool. For Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or any agent that reads project instructions from a directory, save the file into whatever directory your tool loads from. For an agent that can fetch a URL directly, pointing it at the address in the table above is enough.

Install only the skills for libraries you actually use. A skill costs the agent nothing until the task touches that library, but a directory full of unused ones is harder to keep current.

What You Get

Each skill is a few hundred lines covering:

  • Installation — the correct package for Windows, Linux, macOS, ARM and containers, and what changes in Docker or on a locked-down host
  • Licensing — where the key goes and when to set it, which is the single most common cause of a first run failing
  • The core API — the objects and methods that matter, with working examples rather than signatures
  • Pitfalls — the patterns that compile and run but produce a wrong or degraded result

Skills are versioned with the products they describe. Re-download after a major upgrade to pick up API changes.

Licensing

The skills themselves are free to read and redistribute. The libraries they describe require a licence for production use, and each skill covers how to apply a key and how to run in trial mode while you evaluate.

See ironsoftware.com/licensing for details, or contact us if you need something the skills do not cover.