pdfalive

Merge multiple PDFs into one in a user-specified order, then hand off to pdf-optimizer for compression. Use whenever the user wants to "merge", "combine", "concatenate", "join", or "stitch" PDFs together — including phone photos or scans of math homework, lecture notes, or graph-paper pages, individual chapter PDFs, or per-page exports that need to be assembled into a single document. Prevents the common mistake of using `gs` to merge (which silently re-encodes images and bloats scanned input), and shows the right combination of qpdf for ordered concatenation plus pdfunite/mutool fallbacks. Pairs with pdf-optimizer for the post-merge compression step.

Diagnose and compress large PDFs while preserving text fidelity. Use whenever the user wants to "shrink", "compress", "optimize", or "reduce the size of" a PDF — especially scanned books, OCRed documents, or files over ~50MB. Also use when the user complains a PDF is "too big", "huge", "bloated", or "won't fit". The skill prevents the common mistake of reaching for `gs -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook` (which silently *grows* MRC-encoded PDFs by destroying their layered structure) and instead picks the right tool based on what's actually inside the PDF.