cli pdf utilities

There have been multiple instances where I search for cli pdf utilies and always end up in stackoverflow searching for a tool that has minimal dependencies and with the required set of options. I usually end up using the utilies pdfunite and pdfseparate found in the poppler (arch) or poppler-utils (debian/ubuntu based) package. I occasionally find myself using qpdf or gs too. (will update)

combining pdfs

pdfunite commands comes to the rescue:

pdfunite PDF-sourcefile1..PDF-sourcefilen PDF-destfile

example (from the man page):

# merges all pages from sample1.pdf and sample2.pdf (in that order) and creates sample.pdf
pdfunite sample1.pdf sample2.pdf sample.pdf

extracting individual pages

In many cases when you are submitting documents to a website, you scan the hardcopies all at once and end up with a single pdf. If now the website requires you to submit them separately (which is usually the case), you can use pdfseparate.

• If you need all of the pages in the document as separate pdfs:

  pdfseparate sample.pdf sample-%d.pdf
  

  This extracts all pages from sample.pdf, i.e. if sample.pdf has 3 pages, it produces sample-1.pdf, sample-2.pdf, sample-3.pdf

• If you only wish to specify the page ranges to extract:

  pdfseparate -f 3 -l 5 <source_pdf_file> <name>-%d.pdf
  

  You can specify the first and last pages using -f and -l resp. If the source pdf file has 10 pages, this command will extract the individual pages from page 3 to page 5 as separate pdfs.

I will be updating this post to add more tools eventually