Swan — The PDF Swiss-Army CLI

Swan is a lightweight, fast, and dependency-minimal command-line toolkit for PDF manipulation, built entirely in C on top of PDFio.
It provides a set of powerful subcommands to merge, split, reorder, inspect, and generate PDFs — all under a permissive license.

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Features

• Merge multiple PDF files into one
• Inspect internal structure, objects, and metadata (pdf-info)
• Reorder or select specific pages
• Split a PDF into multiple smaller PDFs
• Create a PDF from one or more images (imagetopdf)

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Quick Start

$ ./swan
swan — PDF Swiss-Army CLI

Usage:
  ./swan <command> [options] [args]

Commands:
  merge       Concatenate multiple PDFs into one
  pdf-info    Debug-print PDF structure
  reorder     Reorder pages within a PDF
  split       Split a PDF into multiple files
  imagetopdf  Create a PDF from images

Run './swan <command> -h' for command-specific help.

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Installation Guide:

System Requirements

• Operating System: Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch), or macOS
• Compiler: GCC ≥ 9.0 or Clang ≥ 10.0
• Build System: make or cmake
• Libraries:
  • libjpeg (for image input support)
  • zlib (for compression and streams)
  • pdfio (the core PDF I/O library)

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Step 1: Install Build Dependencies

• Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential cmake git pkg-config \
    libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev

-- Fedora / RHEL

sudo dnf install -y make gcc cmake git \
    libjpeg-turbo-devel zlib-devel

-- Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S base-devel cmake git libjpeg-turbo zlib

Step 2: Install PDFio

Swan depends on PDFio ≥ 1.6.0. If you don’t have it installed system-wide, build it from source - https://github.com/michaelrsweet/pdfio/releases/tag/v1.6.0

Step 3: clone and run Swan

To build the source, all you have to do is

make

To verify just run

./swan