PDF Book Assembler

Overview

Build book-like PDFs with a command-line-first pipeline. This skill uses pdfseparate, pdfunite, gs, pdfinfo, and optionally pdftoppm for the PDF work; the bundled script only orchestrates those tools and computes crop margins.

Use The Workflow

1. Inspect the source PDFs with find, pdfinfo, and, when needed, pdftotext -layout.
2. Determine the exact source order and any drop_first_page, start_page, or end_page rules.
3. Derive bookmark targets as output PDF pages after those page-selection rules are applied.
4. Write a JSON spec and run scripts/build_pdf_book.py <spec.json>.
5. Check the JSON summary, then verify page count and outline structure on the output PDF.

Build The Spec

Read references/spec.md for the JSON shape and examples.

Use level: 1 for chapters and other top-level entries. Use level: 2 for sections under the immediately preceding level-1 bookmark. Do not skip levels.