Book to Skill

omk-book-to-skill is an optional OMK package for turning documents into reusable Agent Skills. It is not part of the OMK core install.

Install

Pin the package when installing from npm:

omk install npm:omk-book-to-skill@0.96.1

In a source checkout:

npm run build --workspace packages/book-to-skill
omk install ./packages/book-to-skill

Run /reload after installation if the current session was already open.

Requirements

• Node.js 22.19 or newer, as required by OMK
• Python 3.9 or newer for document extraction
• Optional extractors in a user-managed Python environment

The package does not add Docling or other Python dependencies to OMK. Plain text and Markdown use the Python standard library; PDF, EPUB, DOCX, RTF, and technical extraction select an available upstream extractor and preserve its confirmation/fallback behavior.

Commands

/book-to-skill-compile <source...>
/book-to-skill-update <existing-skill> <new-source...>
/book-to-skill-verify <generated-skill-directory>

The compile and update commands start an agent turn with the bundled workflow. The package also exposes the ordinary skill commands:

/skill:book-to-skill <source...>
!book-to-skill <source...>

Generated personal skills default to ~/.omk/agent/skills/; project skills use .omk/skills/. The workflow asks when scope is ambiguous.

Reading an OpenKB knowledge base

The package bundles a second skill, openkb, for the other shape of document knowledge: a wiki compiled by the OpenKB CLI rather than a generated skill. It resolves the active knowledge base with openkb status, reads wiki/index.md to pick relevant slugs, then reads concept, entity, and summary pages and follows their wikilinks.

/skill:openkb
!openkb

Routing between the two is fixed. Compiling a document into a reusable skill stays on /book-to-skill-compile, which produces a provenance record that /book-to-skill-verify checks; the openkb skill routes away from OpenKB's own Skill Factory so the request has one answer. Reading an already-compiled knowledge base is the openkb skill's job.

The skill is read-only by construction. Ingest (openkb add), removal, lint --fix, and the interactive and watch modes are proposed to the user with the exact command and its effect, never run on the agent's initiative. Compiled pages are model-generated from documents the user ingested, so the skill treats them as untrusted data rather than instructions, and prefers reading pages directly over openkb query — routing wiki text through a second model call gives an injected instruction another chance to be obeyed.

OpenKB is a separate Python CLI (3.10+) with its own model credentials. OMK installs neither, and the skill stops and says so when openkb is absent instead of guessing a path. Nothing is vendored from OpenKB; the skill is original prose pinned to an upstream commit, recorded in skills/openkb/SOURCE.md in the package.

Despite the similar name, this is unrelated to OMK's own openwiki/ corpus, which is generated from source code rather than documents.

Provenance and verification

After generation, the skill runs the upstream advisory scanner and records .book-to-skill-provenance.json. The bundled workflow resolves scripts/provenance.mjs from the skill directory, so it does not depend on an npm bin path. If omk-book-to-skill is on PATH, the standalone CLI can repeat the checks:

omk-book-to-skill record \
  --skill ~/.omk/agent/skills/example \
  --source ./book.pdf

omk-book-to-skill verify \
  --skill ~/.omk/agent/skills/example \
  --source ./book.pdf

Repeat --source in the original order. During Update / Fold-in, use record --merge-sources to retain prior source digests.

Exit codes:

• 0: artifact hashes, supplied source hashes, and advisory scan passed
• 1: mismatch or scanner finding
• 2: usage error or incomplete verification, such as omitted source files or unavailable Python

/book-to-skill-verify checks artifact integrity and the advisory scanner. Use the CLI with --source to recheck source bytes.

Trust boundary

The provenance file is an unsigned local integrity record. It detects byte changes after compilation, but does not establish authorship, redistribution rights, trusted attestation, or semantic claim-to-source grounding. Source documents remain untrusted data; the workflow must not execute instructions embedded in them.

Supply chain

The package pins the upstream runtime snapshot at commit c4c5e948caaa912c9e2024b925a7cdee9237b0c0 (book-to-skill 1.4.0). upstream.json records SHA-256 digests for every vendored file. Python packages remain external to the npm package and OMK core.

See Skills for discovery and invocation and OMK Packages for package management.