Manipulate PDF files easily with pdftk

Author: Solène

Date: 19 August 2023

Tags: productivity

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Introduction

I often need to work with PDF, sometimes I need to extract a single page, or add a page, too often I need to rotate pages.

Fortunately, there is a pretty awesome tool to do all of these tasks, it's called PDFtk.

pdftkofficial project website

Operations

Pdftk command line isn't the most obvious out there, but it's not that hard.

Extracting a page

Extracting a page requires the `cat` sub command, and we need to give a page number or a range of pages.

For instance, extracting the pages 11, and from 16 to 18 from the file my_pdf.pdf to a new file export.pdf can be done with the following command:

Merging PDF into a single PDF

Merging multiple PDFs into a single PDF also uses the sub command `cat`. In the following example, you will concatenate the PDF first.pdf and second.pdf into a merged.pdf result:

Note that they are concatenated in their order in the command line.

Rotating PDF

Pdftk comes with a very powerful way to rotate PDFs pages. You can specify pages or ranges of pages to rotate, the whole document, or only odd/even pages etc...

If you want to rotate all the pages of a PDF clockwise (east), we need to specify a range `1-end`, which means first to last page:

If you want to select even or odd pages, you can add the keyword `even` or `odd` between the range and the rotation direction: `1-10oddwest` or `2-8eveneast` are valid rotations.

Reversing the page ordering

If you want to reverse how pages are in your PDF, we can use the special range `end-1` which will go through pages from the last to the first one, with the sub command `cat` this will only recreate a new PDF:

Conclusion

Pdftk have some other commands, most people will need to extract / merge / rotate pages, but take a look at the documentation to learn about all pdftk features.

PDF are usually a pain to work with, but pdftk make it very fast and easy to apply transformation on them. What a great tool :-)