register-paper - SKILL.md Agent Skill

name: register-paper description: Convert the paper source to canonical markdown and register it with katz allowed-tools: Read, Write, Bash, Glob, Grep user-invocable: true

Register Paper

Converts the paper source to canonical markdown and registers the result with katz paper register. Katz auto-generates sentence segmentation from the markdown.

The preferred source is the main .tex file — it preserves LaTeX macros, cross-references, math, and footnotes that are lost or garbled in PDF conversion. Fall back to PDF only if no .tex file is available.

Usage

/register-paper

Prerequisites

The repo must have a .katz directory (run katz init if not).
pandoc must be on PATH (for .tex → markdown conversion).
paper2md must be on PATH (for .pdf fallback).
katz must be on PATH.

Workflow

1. Validate preconditions

Confirm .katz/ exists in the repo root. If not, run katz init.
A clean working tree is recommended but not required — katz paper register pins to the current HEAD commit regardless.

2. Find the paper source

Look for the main .tex file first, then fall back to PDF.

Preferred — LaTeX source:

writeup/<name>.tex
paper/<name>.tex
Root directory

Use Glob (**/*.tex) to find candidates. The main file is typically the one that contains \begin{document}. If multiple .tex files exist, check which one is the root document (it will have \documentclass and \begin{document}).

Fallback — PDF:

writeup/<name>.pdf
paper/<name>.pdf

Only use PDF if no .tex source is available in the repo.

3. Convert to markdown

From LaTeX (preferred)

Use pandoc to convert the main .tex file to markdown:

pandoc writeup/paper.tex \
  -f latex -t markdown \
  --wrap=none \
  -o writeup/paper_md/paper.md

Create the output directory first if needed. Key pandoc flags:

--wrap=none — prevents line wrapping that breaks sentence segmentation
-f latex — parse as LaTeX
-t markdown — output GitHub-flavored markdown

If the .tex file uses \input{} or \include{} for sub-files, pandoc will resolve them automatically if run from the correct directory.

From PDF (fallback)

paper2md writeup/paper.pdf --output writeup/paper_md

The output directory will contain paper.md and extracted figure PNGs.

4. Register with katz

# From LaTeX source
katz paper register \
  --canonical writeup/paper_md/paper.md \
  --source-format tex \
  --source-method pandoc \
  --source-root writeup/paper.tex

# From PDF (fallback)
katz paper register \
  --canonical writeup/paper_md/paper.md \
  --source-format pdf \
  --source-method paper2md \
  --source-root writeup/paper.pdf

Adjust the paths to match what you found in step 2. This will:

Read the markdown and segment it into sentences automatically
Write paper_map.jsonl (a typed JSONL ledger with header + sentence records)
Pin the registration to the current HEAD commit

5. Verify

Run katz paper status and confirm the registration succeeded. Report the output to the user, including the sentence count.

6. Cleanup

The output directory (e.g., writeup/paper_md/) is an intermediate artifact. Do NOT commit it or add it to git — it is regenerated on each registration. If it is already in .gitignore, leave it. If not, suggest adding it.