
If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.
In Debian/Ubuntu you can install pdftk via apt:
$ sudo aptitude install pdftk |
Examples:
Merge Two or More PDFs into a New Document
$ pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf |
or (Using Handles):
$ pdftk A=1.pdf B=2.pdf cat A B output 12.pdf |
or (Using Wildcards):
$ pdftk *.pdf cat output combined.pdf |
Split Select Pages from Multiple PDFs into a New Document
$ pdftk A=one.pdf B=two.pdf cat A1-7 B1-5 A8 output combined.pdf |
Rotate the First Page of a PDF to 90 Degrees Clockwise
$ pdftk in.pdf cat 1E 2-end output out.pdf |
Rotate an Entire PDF Document’s Pages to 180 Degrees
$ pdftk in.pdf cat 1-endS output out.pdf |
Encrypt a PDF using 128-Bit Strength (the Default) and Withhold All Permissions (the Default)
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foopass |
Same as Above, Except a Password is Required to Open the PDF
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz |
Same as Above, Except Printing is Allowed (after the PDF is Open)
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.128.pdf owner_pw foo user_pw baz allow printing |
Decrypt a PDF
$ pdftk secured.pdf input_pw foopass output unsecured.pdf |
Join Two Files, One of Which is Encrypted (the Output is Not Encrypted)
$ pdftk A=secured.pdf mydoc.pdf input_pw A=foopass cat output combined.pdf |
Uncompress PDF Page Streams for Editing the PDF Code in a Text Editor
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.clear.pdf uncompress |
Repair a PDF’s Corrupted XREF Table and Stream Lengths (If Possible)
$ pdftk broken.pdf output fixed.pdf |
Burst a Single PDF Document into Single Pages and Report its Data to doc_data.txt
Report on PDF Document Metadata, Bookmarks and Page Labels
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf dump_data output report.txt |
Poppler is a PDF rendering library based on the xpdf-3.0 code base. The poppler-utils package contains pdftops (PDF to PostScript converter), pdfinfo (PDF document information extractor), pdfimages (PDF image extractor), pdftohtml (PDF to HTML converter), pdftotext (PDF to text converter), and pdffonts (PDF font analyzer).
Debian/Ubuntu users can install pdftk via apt:
$ sudo aptitude install poppler-utils |
Convert PDF to TEXT
Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.
$ pdftotext example.pdf example.txt |
If textfile is not specified, pdftotext converts file.pdf to file.txt. If text-file is ´-’, the text is sent to stdout.
To convert page from 3 to 7 (including 3 and 7) use:
$ pdftotext -f 3 -l 7 example.pdf example.txt |
To extract only 3rd page
$ pdftotext -f 3 -l 3 example.pdf example.txt |
$ pdftotext -layout example.pdf example.txt |
Maintain the original physical layout of the text and output the text in reading order.
Set the -nopgbrk option if you don’t want insert page breaks.
Uset -opw (owner password) or -upw (user password) options if the PDF file is password protected.
Extract Images From PDF
Pdfimages saves images from a Portable Document Format (PDF) file as Portable Pixmap (PPM), Portable Bitmap (PBM), or JPEG files.
Pdfimages reads the PDF file, scans one or more pages, and writes one PPM, PBM, or JPEG file for each image, image-root-nnn.xxx, where nnn is the image number and xxx is the image type (.ppm, .pbm, .jpg).
Pdfimages extracts the raw image data from the PDF file, without performing any additional transforms. Any rotation, clipping, color inversion, etc. done by the PDF content stream is ignored.
$ pdfimages example.pdf exampleimage |
The above command will extract all images from example.pdf. The images will be saved in PPM format.
Use -j option to save images as JPG format
$ pdfimages -j example.pdf exampleimage |
Use the -f and -l options to specify the startpage and lastpage to scan. To scan pages 3 to 7 (including 3 and 7) use:
$ pdfimages -f 3 -l 7 example.pdf exampleimage |
To scan only one specific page use:
$ pdfimages -f 3 -l 3 example.pdf exampleimage |
If the PDF file is password protected use -opw or -upw option:
-opw Owner password
-upw User password
Convert PDF to HTML
pdftohtml is a program that converts pdf documents into html. It generates its output in the current working directory.
Usage:
$ pdftohtml file.pdf file.html |
If you want to see graphics, you’ll need to use the -c (as in “complex”) option:
$ pdftohtml -c file.pdf file.html |
Convert PDF to Image
First you need to have ImageMagick installed in your machine.
To install ImageMagick in Debian/Ubuntu run the following command:
$ sudo aptitude install imagemagick |
To convert pdf file to image use the ‘convert‘ command:
$ convert doc.pdf doc.jpeg |
convert to tiff
$ convert doc.pdf doc.tiff |
for more information look here.
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