Overview

What is Scimon?

Scimon is a fast, Rust-powered command-line tool for building document collections from a single, declarative list. You describe what you want in the Scimon language (.mon) and the interpreter does the rest — downloading papers, rendering Markdown and LaTeX to PDF, capturing AI conversations, generating QR codes, and more.

What began as a batch PDF downloader has grown into a small, friendly language: the syntax is intuitive and quick to write, with a clear separation between variables (single-line, e.g. path "...") and blocks (multi-line, e.g. downloads { ... }), all processed top to bottom.

Features

• 📥 Batch downloads — list URLs and fetch them all, with per-line renaming (as "name.pdf"), skipping (!ignore), archive extraction (!unzip) and subfolders via group "name" { ... }.
• 🔁 Ranges & fallbacks — expand a numeric range into many downloads ({2203.08877..08880}), list mirror URLs with ||, and retry flaky ones with !retry(3).
• 🧩 Variables, functions, loops & conditionals — keep lists DRY with @var name "..." (used as ${name}), reusable fn name(args) { ... } templates, for x in [...] { ... } expansion, and if / else conditional blocks.
• 🌐 Smart providers — Arxiv, Sci-Hub, Wikipedia/Wikisource, GitHub/GitLab and more are handled automatically.
• 💬 AI conversations to PDF — paste a ChatGPT or Gemini share link and Scimon scrapes, cleans, and prints it (images inlined).
• 🤖 AI-generated documents — describe what you want in an ai { ... } block and Scimon writes the files for you via OpenRouter, as Markdown or rendered straight to PDF.
• 📐 Built-in LaTeX compiler — turn .tex files into PDF with no TeX distribution installed (theorems, bibliography, acronyms, TikZ, pgfplots, and more).
• 📝 Markdown rendering — render Markdown to styled PDF with MathJax and Mermaid support.
• 🔢 Math to image — render formulas straight to PNG.
• 🔗 Merge PDFs — combine many PDFs into one with a glob or an ordered list (merge "papers/*.pdf" > "out.pdf", or merge [ "a.pdf", "b.pdf" ] > "out.pdf").
• ✂️ Split PDFs — split a PDF into one file per page (split "doc.pdf" > "pages/page-{n}.pdf").
• 🔃 Rotate PDFs — rotate every page by a multiple of 90° (rotate "scan.pdf" 90 > "out.pdf").
• 💧 Watermark PDFs — stamp every page with text or an image (watermark "doc.pdf" "DRAFT" > "out.pdf", or ... image "logo.png" > ...).
• 🔄 Convert files — turn local files into other formats by extension (convert "doc.md" > "doc.pdf"): Markdown→PDF/HTML/EPUB, LaTeX→PDF, HTML→PDF.
• 🔳 QR codes & covers — generate QR codes and extract document covers.
• 🗜️ Compression & scripts — zip output folders and run Python/JavaScript/TypeScript steps (with a secure-by-default runner).
• 🌍 Built-in web server — browse and preview the generated files in your browser (lightbox for images/PDFs, dark mode), via the serve command or server "PORT" in a list.
• 📦 Composable packages — import "..." splices another list into yours from a local file, a remote URL, or a Monlib package.

Requirements

• Rust & Cargo (to build from source).
• A Chromium/Chrome install — used to render HTML/Markdown/LaTeX to PDF.
• pdfium binaries — only if you use the covers feature.

Quick start

Create a file named scimon.mon:

// where the files are saved
@var path "downloads/"

path "${path}"

downloads {
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.08877 as "arxiv_paper.pdf"
    https://chatgpt.com/share/67c3f647-0bac-8005-abbb-012c3c1dafcc as "chat.pdf"
}

Scimon supports // line comments and /* ... */ block comments — see the comments guide.

Run it:

scimon run scimon.mon

A fuller example

@var path "downloads/"

fn arxiv(id, name) {
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/${id} as "${name}"
}

path "${path}"

copy "${path}backup/"

open "https://github.com/kremilly"

compress "folder.zip"

covers "${path}covers/"
qrcode "${path}qrcodes/"

math "2 + 2" > "${path}math.png"
math "2 + 3" > "${path}math1.png"

print "Hello, World!"

readme "https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Kremilly/5fd360d994bb0fe108b648d0e4c9e92f/raw/1ede0877f2bd023e77674eb89f4a0eb7d8f7e7da/readme-example.md"

downloads {
    arxiv("2203.08877", "arxiv_paper.pdf")

    for id in ["2106.09685", "1706.03762"] {
        https://arxiv.org/pdf/${id} as "${id}.pdf"
    }

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/{2405.01510..01513}
    https://primary.example/spec.pdf || https://mirror.example/spec.pdf as "spec.pdf" !retry(2)
    https://example.com/dataset.zip !unzip
    https://chatgpt.com/share/67c3f647-0bac-8005-abbb-012c3c1dafcc as "chatgpt_conversation.pdf"
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.01513 !ignore
    https://www.sci-hub.se/10.1626/JCS.66.427
    https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~jimmylin/publications/Busch_etal_ICDE2012.pdf

    group "readmes" {
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/facebook/react/main/README.md
        https://raw.githubusercontent.com/h4cknlearn/architecture101/main/README.md !ignore
    }
    https://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Manifesto_da_Guerrilha_do_Livre_Acesso !ignore
}

merge "${path}*.pdf" > "${path}all.pdf"

split "${path}all.pdf" > "${path}pages/page-{n}.pdf"

rotate "${path}all.pdf" 90 > "${path}all-rotated.pdf"

watermark "${path}all.pdf" "CONFIDENTIAL" > "${path}all-wm.pdf"

convert "${path}report.md" > "${path}report.pdf"

ai {
    "Write a short article about the Rust programming language" as "rust.md"
    "Explain quantum computing for beginners" as "quantum.pdf" with "anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet"
}

commands {
    https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Kremilly/e0e0db11e43269da179adab610f38bb1/raw/6820be26a936a54bac713d03deb49edf804d0b6b/index.py
}

server "8080"

The ai block generates documents using OpenRouter. Set your key with scimon options write-env (or edit the .env file) so that OPENROUTER_API_KEY="..." is defined. Each entry takes a prompt and an output file (as "name.md"): use a .md name to save raw Markdown or a .pdf name to render a styled PDF. Add with "provider/model" to override the default model.

Save the file as scimon.mon, then run scimon run scimon.mon. With server "8080", the generated files are served at http://127.0.0.1:8080 until you stop it with Ctrl+C.